Bound
by Tiggy Malvern
Summary: Sands has things arranged just how he likes them, but other people have different ideas. Sixth in the Wires series, with ongoing language and violence. Story now complete.
1. Chapter 1

_Wow. I knew it was going to be slow writing this one, but I wasn't expecting it to be nearly two years. A classic case of Real Life Ate My Fic.  
_

_Huge thanks for the beta work to Julia K, Lady Ganesh and Solo. Any stray Britishisms that remain are my fault entirely. And thanks as ever to Robert Rodriguez for being a Man of Ideas._

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The bleep of his watch was muted and short beneath the low-buzzing rattle from the kitchen, marking off the fifteen.

Sands tipped his head back to the wall behind his chair, long-settled with his fingers linked on the table in front of him, all out in plain sight. Resisted the urge to reach over and drain the last pleasingly bitter drops from his near-empty coffee.

If this was a first meet, he would have walked by now - wouldn't want to set a precedent for bad habits. But he'd already invested enough time and 'favours' in this one to want paying, and it was evolving nicely towards a bit more entertainment potential than anything else he had running right now. So many of even the most intelligent people had such small minds, a pitiful lack of imagination and flair when it came to their business dealings. It might be worth a few minor inconveniences here and there for a chance to shake out the boredom.

When it came, the rustle from the bar, the soft dull tap of sole on metal, he didn't move.

Five count, steady, slow.

Showtime.

He waved the girl over for a refill on his coffee maybe a second before the door opened and the footsteps came his way, quick and heavy. Lomas flopped into the seat opposite, quick strained creak of it under him, and he stayed silent while she poured. No question Sands had the right guy here - he breathed like a pig rooting through dirt, and he oozed sweat even with the air-con pinning the temperature somewhere in the sixties.

Sands thanked the waitress with a flashed smile, and made a point of asking for the check. Lomas never ordered anyway, but it left him shuffling with a thousand restless small twitches through the minutes while Sands stirred sugar into his coffee and counted out the notes for the payment and tip.

Her feet tapped off back to the kitchen, light, fast, efficient, flash of heavy heat and chatter as the door opened and resealed with a click behind her.

Lomas was leaning in across the table, words low and urgent. "So what have you got for me?"

So very eager, so very easy to bait.

Sands set his cup back down on its saucer, his fingers still wrapped around it, and curled his lip just a hint at one edge. "Nothing."

"Nothing?"

Sands tipped his head slightly and angled his eyebrows. "I almost hate to say it, because there aren't too many out there, but he's actually clean. You set me to digging dirt on the one government official in Bolivia who isn't taking backhanders or picking out the sugar jobs for his nephews and brothers-in-law. The guy doesn't even screw around on his wife." He let the curl stretch till it was something like a smile. "I'm assuming that very incorruptibility is why you need something on him."

"It's taken you over a month to find nothing?" Lomas was turning predictably edgy, voice taut with an anger lashed down only out of respect for his current carefully public situation.

Sands shrugged and took another sip at too-hot coffee, aiming sunglasses over the rim. "Finding something's the easy part. It's convincing yourself there really isn't anything well hidden if you dig just a little deeper that takes the time."

"I'm paying by results here, not by the hour. You got nothing, you get nothing from me."

Getting pissed actually did something for the guy - he quit all the irritating shifting and snorting while he made his point at least. Still not exactly intimidating, but as close as he was ever likely to get.

Sands smiled quick and wide, lips pressed together all the way. "Oh, you'll pay me what we agreed, and then some extra. After all, the job didn't go away - it just got a little more complicated." It was always amusing to play them along the tracks, poke them into response, knowing all the while they'd stick around and take it, everything running precisely to his cues.

And then something was going wrong, motion from over by the bar where there shouldn't be. Shifting with rustles and a faint metallic chink, and El was on his feet and moving, footsteps slipping away. Away towards the door in fast, even strides.

There was never any deviation from the script.

Lomas was talking again, more like ranting, nothing that fell outside the parameters of the predicted conversation pattern, and Sands' focus was locked on El and what was beyond El, head frozen against the burning urge to turn and track; couple of low mundane conversations from the near-empty bar, everything normal but for those footsteps direct and purposeful and the rattle-click of the door, the rush of traffic and chatter street-bright in the moments before it sealed shut, slicing El from his senses.

What the fuck was going on?

Coffee cup hot under his gloves, beautifully baited mark fuming and desperate right there for the skewering, and a void in the part of his head tuned to track and monitor the mariachi. Not unprecedented, El wasn't glued to him permanent and pathetic, but he should be expecting it, he should have _warning_.

Sands didn't need a babysitter for jobs like this, but it made some of his clients happier to think he did. Otherwise they got nervous, started to wonder what they were missing and look a little deeper, when Sands didn't want them thinking that way. And some of his more reluctant informants weren't so inclined to cause him annoyance if El came along. Sands could handle the annoyance, but it was less hassle to be able to skip straight to the civilised exchange. All El had to do on these trips out was hang back and glare, which Sands seemed to recall he was reasonably good at, and whatever he did, Sands figured it worked.

The bodyguard schtick doubled up well with his living arrangements too. Sands didn't give a mile high fuck what anybody thought of him or his choices in bed on a personal level, but working in these superstition-steeped Catholic countries, those kinds of rumours would cost him paying clients and inspire his sources to turn pissy on him. He was never inclined to make his life hard when it could be easy, and nobody would question him keeping the hired gun close by at nights.

Sands didn't need a babysitter, but when back-up was built into the scenario, the play didn't work so well without it. Sands non-threatening was part of the deal, hands on the table and with no trick in place to get around it, because it wasn't needed.

El was a guy driven by habit, a few basic wants and desires; he didn't split from a settled routine without a specific kind of trigger. There had to be something going on, something Sands was missing outside of this self-inflated prick across the table, something he needed to _know_ and -

If there was something out there, El wasn't sure enough to tip him off.

Lomas hadn't shown any obvious reaction to El's leaving, or to anything that could have sparked it, but the stupid cunt-brain just might be oblivious to anything subtle. Once El was out the door, Sands couldn't know anything, no way to tell if he'd stuck around or if he was off half a mile down the street already and Sands was on his own.

But that wasn't how it was - if El had to bail, he wouldn't do it without letting Sands know, some signal, the warning. So El was right there by the windows, lounging back against the frame and lighting up a smoke, relaxed and casual while he checked out something that was most likely turning out nothing but a minor glitch on the norm.

Well, if that was how it was gonna be played, Sands might as well take advantage. These conversations always ran a little smoother and more direct with El out of earshot, and he wanted this over so's he could be sitting by the radio with a coffee before the afternoon rain shower came due and drowned out half his surroundings in pounding rattle and swish. Lomas had had his break to let the steam out long enough.

Elbow on the table, Sands leaned in towards the monotonous flow of words, waving a hand in front of him to swat them away like a fly. "You know, there are more pro-active ways of dealing with your problem," he said, gliding his speech confident and smooth over the torrent. "You need him out of the way so someone a little more... amenable to your interests can take his place. Just because the guy's clean, doesn't mean the plan's got to be written off. You only need to make it look as if he's got some mud trailing around the edges." Sands shrugged, quick and dismissive. "Or depending how fast you need things to happen, you could always arrange to remove him less indirectly."

Silence, the almost audible tick-tick-tick of a brain straining top speed and still laughably slow, and Sands reached careful and obvious for his pocket, stripped the plastic from a pack of cigarettes and lit one through the gap. He didn't particularly need one right now, but it always made a useful stage prop. He sucked the smoke back deep through his lungs, the flow of it smooth and alive in his throat, good even when he wasn't strung out tight for it.

Lomas scraped his chair in an inch or so closer to the table, and this was when the real game hit the starter. "Suppose I like your suggestion." Voice quick and quiet, not secretive and attention-attracting, just low enough to be practical. Business mode on, the one place Lomas actually carried some steel and scored some points. "I don't see a reason I'd need you for it."

Sands matched his tone and the speed of his words, speaking round the filter rather than delay by lifting it away. "You don't know the right people to approach for this kind of work. If something goes wrong, the burn follows the trail of spilled gasoline and ends up right back at your door. Employing the services of a middle-man adds a layer of fire-proofing - you never even meet the contractors."

"So now you think it won't work."

Sands stuck out his lower lip and blew smoke up towards the ceiling, the heated tang of it vivid and rough at his nose as he half-smiled. "Let's just say I've learned from experience that even the best plans can use a get-out, just in case."

Lomas snorted - it would have been more effective if it wasn't just a dramatisation of his natural breathing pattern. "And what about you if something goes wrong? Why would you take on the risk?"

Sands shrugged. "I disappear. Not quite so easy for the man with the four kids and the sweetly-padded job he's so attached to." He flicked his fingers towards the ashtray alongside his saucer and arched his eyebrows to the limit. "And don't forget, you'll be paying me well for it."

"If I decide to pay you at all."

Sands just let the corners of his lips slide upwards and rolled the cigarette slow between his thumb and fingertips. Lomas was all set to bite, whether he'd admit it yet or not.

Not that it was going to make any difference, since Cuevas would be out of his job in a few months at most either way. Morales was going to take the election and drop-kick the old firm into a lengthy exile - the polls weren't telling it that way yet, but they'd come around. And that result would be adding yet another layer of insulation between Sands and any official representatives of his dear old Uncle Sam and the rest of the family back home. If Sands could make a little cash and find a little fun along the way, well, that just sprinkled the sugar layer over the top.

Lomas pushed his chair out from the table - well back in a drawn-out grating squeak, meeting apparently over - hauling himself upright with his usual level of grace, table quivering hard beneath Sands' elbow, and _the door pushed open from outside, footsteps over the street noise, El;_ El sliding back through the room and into place at the bar, smooth, light, unhurried, everything good. Scrape of Lomas' sole as he turned to watch before his attention and his head came back to Sands. "I might be in touch," he said as his goodbye gesture. He'd offered Sands a hand to shake at one of the early meetings, obvious from the swinging movement-pause, but a table apart was quite close enough for Sands. There were one or two places being blind really did give a guy an easy ticket.

Sands drew a final long kick of smoke back into his lungs as Lomas walked away, then screwed the rest of the cigarette into the ashtray. "I'll be expecting you," he said to nobody in particular, though El would be listening.

He swallowed the last of his coffee - too sweet, but he'd been having too much fun stringing Lomas out with the sugar to stop - and slid to his feet, steady and confident through the bar, El drifting into place beside and slightly behind.

Sands stopped in the open doorway, let the noise of the street settle into his head, the heat and humidity wrapping close and clinging round his body. Sound filtered to find the gap in the passing feet, the cane snapped out before him as he stepped onto the sidewalk.

It irritated him, having to use it, every fucking time, the click-click-click of it on stone, the swinging rhythm in his wrist that had eased unnoticed into something natural when it was the most viciously artificial thing a person could ever have to fucking do, but they'd left the car too far down the street for him to gamble on an unobstructed stroll. The movements of his legs felt dragging, cautious, scaled down from the mariachi's pace, but the cane only took a category three storm to his personality construct. Continually trotting after El like an eager and hyper-obedient puppy would wreak devastation on his image more like a level five.

Sands picked up on the rumours that did the rounds; half the people who mattered weren't entirely sure he wasn't faking at least some of the vision loss. Sands would have enjoyed shooting for more than half, but there were some genuine practical limitations to what he could achieve.

El tripped the locks when he was a few feet from the car - Sands carried keys as spares in case of problems, but why go fishing through his pockets when he was never gonna get to really use them? He didn't touch the bodywork, reached right for the handle, found metallic expanse smooth and barely curved beneath the glove anyway, _fuck_, swept his fingers down, curling to grip. An inch high this time. A bitch to judge allowing for some variable amount of kerb depth, but it would have looked smooth enough to anyone who didn't score an El in observation skills.

He swung himself into his seat, cane slipped down underneath, and El was inside seconds after him, firing up the engine and pulling away. They were moving down the street, city-speed, smooth with the steady flowing traffic, and El wasn't saying anything, no light words to explain away his little disappearing moment back there.

Not something that was going to be tossed out and buried in a sentence then.

If four minutes in the car wouldn't be enough to cover it, Sands wasn't going to kick that conversation off either. He never liked having a discussion interrupted at an unpredictable point; everything flowed so much smoother when it was his choice whether or not the other guy got time to think.

He was starting to want that damned smoke now, but he'd killed the habit of lighting up in succession a while back, and it wasn't one he'd be inviting back home. He buzzed his window down a few inches, let the breeze in - hot and thick with the stench of engine fumes, but the air-con stank of stale plastic and he liked the rush of real air, whistling past his ear and over his throat, tugging through his hair.

Sands already had a man in mind for the Lomas job - he'd put the feelers out this afternoon, get past the tedious theoretical aspect of the negotiations. Then when Lomas had kept him waiting long enough to satisfy his ego and took the offer, it would all be in place and ready to run. It was going to be an interesting race to get both commission and payment completed before the polls tipped Morales' way and Lomas backed out. And even more interesting to see if Lomas could contain his temper when he realised he'd taken an entirely pointless risk and been screwed out of the round thirty thousand.

Life was working pretty well for Sands right now. And given where he'd found himself a couple of years back, that was actually quite a statement.

He had a sharp and reliable back-up, a good lay and a still-interesting-to-play-with challenge all wrapped up in one Mariachi-shaped package, which was a jetstream high improvement over having to deal with three separate people for his range of kicks. He had cash building up fast in a variety of places, mostly because El refused to spend anything more than basic living expenses. Sands suspected it wasn't doing much for the mariachi's pride, the experience of living off of someone else's earnings, which was amusing when Sands had existed mostly through El's largesse for some nine months after the Day of the Dead and never cared a rat's prick about it.

El knew when to shut the hell up and keep out of the way, and was more than happy to spend an entire day in one room with the guitar and a pencil. Sands had never come across a woman who didn't resent being told to piss off and go entertain herself when he was busy. He tired fast of making meaningless apologies and he wasn't a flowers and chocolates kind of guy, and thankfully El didn't want either. The guitar was a pain in the ass for confusing his dictation software, but a few closed doors between them solved that inconvenience well enough. And sometimes through the deals, El would catch something Sands just couldn't, a quick detail relayed back in the car that tipped him to a potential problem ahead of time.

His current arrangements suited him just fine. He didn't like them being changed around without notice.

He closed the window as El pulled into the garage, engine throbbing loud off the concrete through his head before it stuttered and died in a rattle of keys.

El was out of the car before Sands had retrieved the cane, echoes from the sharp clunk of the door and the fading strides. Sands flicked his cane out right to find the wall, landmark for his position in the world, again as a double check on the first stair, then tucked it under his arm as he walked up confident to where El was jingling at the lock.

El was inside by the time Sands got there, moving fast over to one of the closets and hauling open the door to smack back against the wall. Sands lounged himself over the chair near the doorway, stretched out his feet to cross at the ankles, and slung an arm along the wooden back. Tipped his head into the sounds as El rooted around deep in the shelves.

"So what was with the sudden urge to take a leak?"

Pause before the answer, an in-breath, briefest halt in the rustling. "I always had you covered." El was half inside the cupboard, hollow-bouncing words reflected back, but he shaped the tones evenly, gave it some low sincerity instead of snapping it out the way this mood of his usually talked.

"I know." If he didn't, he would've been considerably more pissed about it.

El was dragging something from the closet, weight scraping big over the chipboard of a high shelf, dropping it to the floor with a soft whumph.

Travel bag.

Sands hadn't planned on going anywhere for a while yet.

"I got a call."

That was new - El's cell ran more along the lines of a security precaution than a phone. "Must've been something interesting."

"From Lorenzo." Oh, and there was a name dredged up from the ocean floor with the limpets. Sands hadn't wasted brain-space on either of the sidekicks since they'd parted ways that last trip to Mexico. "Somebody's looking into them," El said. "Somebody who's also been asking questions about me."

So finally someone had strung all the beads together in a row and made a necklace. It had taken longer than it should have.

Sands swung his feet round further, more of his weight on the chair back, head turned direct the Mariachi's way.

"There's a couple of things you should take into consideration before you go rushing off."

"Like what?"

"You do realise Lorenzo's perfectly capable of dealing with his own issues."

"So am I. He still helps when I ask. What's next on this list?"

Sands had never felt the need to get all in-someone's-face and overdramatic to get a point across. He'd always found threats worked just as well quiet and from a distance. "You're not going wandering off on any world tours without inviting me along."

The scraping and rustling from the closet stopped, El's feet turning to cross the floor towards him. "I know." Touch of a thumb dry at his jaw, still, and then gone. "I've known that for a long time now."

Right. And he'd waited for Sands to offer instead of asking because Sands had already told him he hated that fucking camel shit country and wasn't going back. Jesus, El could be tiresome when he tried to play noble. "Good. I've got a meeting at four I really shouldn't skip out on if we want to find life quite as pleasant when we get back, and I'll need to make a few calls. We can be on a plane early evening."

"I'll be packed when you're done."

"Clean up too, just in case. How long will we be gone?"

"I don't know."

Only what he'd expected, but it did fuck all for his planning. Looked like Lomas was wriggling off the line this time, though he'd sweat rainforests through a few shirts till he got it figured out. "I'll clear the rent for three months. Which airport?"

"Acapulco."

"Tasteful. At least I'll fit right in." If the sidekicks were holed up in tourist central, maybe they'd drunk their way through the lottery win already.

"We only need the tickets. Lorenzo can see to the rest."

Sands wasn't sure he liked the implied delay on the guns, but it would be simpler to avoid any direct dealings in Mexico where there were alternatives. "Fine. Just make sure he puts the emphasis on good old-fashioned bullets instead of flame-throwers. I don't plan on sharing in his fetishes."

"I think he knows what I like." Layer of buried humour back in El's voice, and they'd been grabbing weaponry from one another long enough now that whatever worked for El would be familiar and functional to Sands, if not his first choice.

Sands thought about some of the other things El liked, and raised eyebrows high in his direction in case he turned. "Oh, I doubt he's got the full picture," he said lightly. "At least, not yet."

Another flashed break in the rustles as El threw him some kind of Look, but he didn't have anything verbal to add to it. Sands grabbed his laptop from the nightstand, took it through to the main living area away from El's packing, and fired it up.

He had a couple of files close to ready - not as tidy as he normally liked things at that simple level, but the basics were all in there. He'd print those out and slip someone the cash to get them delivered - Lariño worked out well, he knew just enough about Sands not to get too interested in the contents of packages. His recipients probably wouldn't pay the full account for incomplete info, but what he had would keep his reputation from skidding off full speed down the avalanche slope with this sudden cut-and-run.

He opened up a text file, skimmed fingertips over the edges of the key rows as he worked out a brief cover note to go with the files. He didn't like reliance on the dictation software, the unpleasant aspect of having to speak his plans aloud grating in the edges of his brain. He was gaining efficiency at basic typing, sliding and jabbing faster at keys, the words machine-read back at him through the earphone to check for errors while his fingers formed the few vague sentences - business delayed, he'd be available to collect more detail when he returned if they were still interested. His mind steered his hands across the layout, tracked the stumbling, badly pitched digi-speech for his mistakes, and still more than enough left over to _think._

Mexico.

Fucking Christ. It wasn't someplace he'd ever wanted to see on his list of vacation hotspots, and he'd thought he'd bleached it out of existence entirely back when the Mariachi had baulked at the idea of a trip home. Not that any one of these Jesus-sucking Latin piss-holes rose cliff-like above the others in standards, but outside of Mexico there were fewer people looking for him who didn't have paid employment in mind.

He could think of places he'd like to visit less, even now, though it wasn't the lengthiest list - mostly the kind of countries where they still hacked off people's fucking hands, because he wasn't ever putting himself in line for losing any more body parts.

He could've sat this one out easy enough, no obligations; could've stayed at this table with its plasticised wood veneer smooth beneath his sleeves, surrounded by known entities and limitless knowledge that only needed him to pinpoint the right apple and reach out to pluck it. But no part of his ideas on entertainment included waiting around for weeks or months, trying to figure out if El was just keeping busy or if he'd finally gotten himself killed. From what Sands figured of the sidekicks, they suffered from the bullet-induced gun-happies just as much as El did. Somebody really ought to stick around to slam the brakes on any truly ass-cracked plans those three were likely to be laying down. Sure, El talked a big line about not wanting to keep on shooting people as the main course of his day, but it was amusing just how fast that could be turned around once he got to doing it, and –

His fingers froze, locked onto the keys, long, confused 'o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o' stuttering from the voice synth till he jerked them away.

It hadn't figured into his thinking, not even a sidelong glimpse of it.

It hadn't occurred to him, not till right now, that El might have chosen to stick around with his old friends and not come back.

The thought pissed him off, but he was more pissed that he hadn't considered it, that he'd just assumed, when he didn't assume anything.

Christ.

It wasn't fear at the thought of being without El - he'd been there, checked out the scenery and gotten the stamps in his passport to prove it, and he wasn't planning any revisits. He'd do just fine on his own if he had to. But he had a head full of good reasons for not wanting to.

Every aspect of his business dealings included calculations of risk, assessments of betrayal and double-cross, the ways out of the potential trap. El factored into most of the decisions he made, right from whether to take on a job for a particular client, and he was pivotal to his plans extending months ahead. Without the mariachi, every meeting had to be in specific locations, known interiors with paid eyes to tip him off to aberrations and familiar surroundings if he had to get out, a limitation that cost him both sources and paid requests. El gave him flexibility and scope, knowledge and speed, the ability to learn faster and more reliably, and Sands hadn't stopped to consider for the longest time what El might be taking home from his end of the deal.

It had been easy at first, and entirely deliberate. He'd given El revenge, a focus, a _reason,_ the undeniable lure of everything El had been pretending wasn't missing from his pitiful excuse for an existence.

And then he'd taken it away again, sliced the man from both his home and his fight.

There was unquestionably some aspect of loyalty keeping El close, a factor that went a long way with a man like that once it was triggered - its threads wove all around him, so dense they were almost visible, binding him, obligation biting deep and spreading through like a cancer. Once on board the Mariachi's protection list, it took a lot of effort for someone to get himself kicked back off again, though it wasn't entirely impossible - the notorious dead brother had proved that. But El's mariachi tag-team had that same loyalty too, and he didn't stay with them.

Not yet.

The quick, rising whine of a zipper buzzed through from the other room. El was done with one of the bags.

Sands had lost the keys, the layout before him when he dragged his hand away, and he traced it into his world with fingers; following edges to set the back key into place, tapping with an index through the count of o's he'd notched up. Set the voice reading through from the start again to check, catching the two stray letters he'd skipped, and worked on to the end of the message. The keys dipped solid and smooth beneath his fingertips, damp from his skin, click-click-click under the digi-speech running in his head.

He queued the jobs up to print, two copies of the cover note, one each of the files, the inkjet kicking off its first rattle-whirr behind him as his hands found the envelopes in his desk. He called up Lariño and got the mailbox, left a message to stop by before five. El would be around if he showed while Sands was at the meet.

He lit himself a cigarette, fingers automatically drifting to check for the ashtray on the corner of the desk. He sat loose in the chair, head tipped back against the rest, the invasive, erratic clatter of the printer flooding his ears, occasional clicks and soft scrapes of El's packing from the bedroom low beneath it.

He sucked the smoke back long, shaped his mouth and exhaled quick, short to huff out smoke rings that would float across the desk. He'd spent hours one lazy afternoon too hot even for bugs perfecting the art on Steve Holden's back porch. Steve always had the best weed.

He couldn't see them now, but Sands didn't believe in letting a skill fade away once it was acquired.

In his head, the thoughts were already starting to run, sniff, scatter and reform.


	2. Chapter 2

Flying was a bitch.

It hadn't ever been on his list of fun things to do, not since he was a kid and leeching his kicks out of take-off, the rising whine of engines and the push back into his seat, and it wasn't getting any better when he couldn't watch the movies or read a book. Worse when the turbulence fucked with his stomach, made him spend most of the flight wanting to heave, and choking it down 'cos he wasn't gonna puke in a sick bag and he wasn't gonna go stumbling down the aisle tripping over feet while he groped for the bathroom either. Music only filled so many of the holes in his head, and the headphones gripped him in a reverberating pound that swelled through his skull if he wore them right through the flight.

He fucking hated explaining to the dicktards at security that no, he wouldn't be taking off his shades so they could check his face against the one in his passport, not unless they wanted to be held responsible for the nightmares of half the snot-sniffing, whining brats in line.

The taxi ride round the tourist pisshole that was Acapulco in the mid-fall heat was no improvement over the planes. The driver they'd gotten was the real chatty type, wanting to know who they were, how long they were staying, pushing a card at them for if they needed another ride. El fenced off most of his conversation in terse replies - they were staying with friends and no, they wouldn't need another cab - leaving Sands silent, his head pressed to the vinyl by its own weight. Vibrations through the metal from road and suspension prickled at his temple, the heat and noise of a city afternoon notching up the tightness settled behind his non-existent eyes. Advil held back the pain, the reaction to loss of sleep, but it couldn't switch off the racing feet tap-tap-tapping in his head, scampering like rats.

Once he caught a thought, set a trail, his mind tracked it down to the end, through every permutation, every split in the road, setting weight and chance to each possible route till he got it figured.

There'd been a while there after the Day of the Dead when Sands' own brain had done a kick-ass job of trying to fuck him over. He'd hear sounds, vague uncertain shuffles, and his mind would trip off in a fit of the crazies, invent all kinds of shit behind them - the quick snick outside that was the flick of a safety, the soft scraping in the quiet of the early hours that was someone picking at the window catches, Guevara coming for him with drugs, coming for him with _drills_ to smile while he screamed and screamed, and he lay and shivered, trapped when he could barely stand and he couldn't _see_, the grip of an M-11 branded into his palm.

It had eased up some once he'd heard the beetle-licking bastard-fucker was well and truly dead. But the last of it hadn't faded for a long time after.

There were afternoons in summer when the rain hammered around the apartment for hours, the low sounds beneath lost entirely and the frequencies that came through all distorted like running paint. It was worse when he first moved to some new place, always the local oddities he needed to pin down and file. He counted himself fucking Olympic medal standard on the auditory perception scale - he'd heard the line about how the other senses heightened to compensate, and it was all so much cracked out camel shit. It was nothing but practice and concentration, and he figured he'd scored a little higher on the motivation front there than most people who found themselves suddenly blind one day. But it didn't matter how good he was, he was never gonna be able to catch and filter everything. And there was still that small place tucked up in the back of his brain at lizard-level, way out of reach of his logic, that insisted strange sounds in the dark had to be monsters, even if they were the human kind.

Nothing was ever gonna come even close to those moments of not being able to trust himself, to not _knowing_ what he thought he knew. But he wasn't all cosied up with spending big chunks of his time second and third-guessing El by this stage of the play either.

He didn't need El - he'd proved that once, and he didn't feel inspired to do it again. Wanting - well, that was an entirely different proposition. Sands had made it a lifelong principle to get what he wanted, and keep it if he wanted, too.

The unfortunate downside to that was when the dice didn't roll with the plan, it went wrong in spectacularly bad ways.

Soft rustle from El, the creak of the seat under shifting weight, a quick brush of fingers at his sleeve, and Sands straightened, angled his head to the window for the sounds. Only a few cars passing now, low-murmuring engines buried in the rush of wind; nobody to hear on the streets, occasional high, excited squeals of kids that carried, a short series of barks before the mutt was quieted, fast. Residential neighbourhood, one of the better ones.

The cab pulled up, presumably at the address El had given in La Sabana, a suburb sprawling in the hills above the main squeeze of the city. Sands' hand went straight to the door, which he'd had plenty of time to surreptitiously explore, finding the handle and stretching out a leg slow, like it was stiff after the journey, till he touched sidewalk. The cane was packed away in his bag - he was stuck with being an American, but Mexico wasn't the place to go around advertising anything else about himself that might bring in added interest.

Sun slanted warm across one side of his face, the drone of the cab's engine fading back from his head in the wash of breeze. Only a slight salt hint beneath the hydrocarbon fumes, most of it stripped bare by the miles travelled over land, but fresh, unconfined, missing the stink of too many bodies cramped up in too small a space. He took a few steps along the sidewalk, his head tilting into the air, his mind running background checks on the voices further along the street, chattering about the mundanities of groceries, while El hung back to pay the driver. Sands felt he'd already been paid well enough with his turgid little life - if Sands had been left to deal with that irritating chatter alone, he would've shot him ten blocks back and walked.

Controlled thwumps as heavy bags met the sidewalk, the click-tap of the inflexible guitar case, and then the trunk slammed behind him, taxi pulling away seconds later in an elderly rattle.

El's steps moved his way, heavier, weighted, and Sands reached out to take the bag that brushed against his leg. The address they'd given was a few blocks over from the place they were headed for, and Sands' feet were drawn automatically after El's, the sidewalk smooth under his sole every time, unblemished by cracks or weeds. The breeze pushed through his nose as they walked, veering over his skin with every side street, bringing the sharp scents of greenery and flowers, the occasional heavier aromas of cooking. Low voices and music drifted from open windows as they passed, the rare too-loud screech of a TV, the heat pricking over his whole body in a way that lifted the wire from round his skull, no longer trapped in a metallic box with strangers and staring eyes.

"We're here." Fifty-four paces from the last intersection, and El turned right, Sands following up... nine steps and along a path that curved, pointless and annoying. He stopped when El did, waiting behind as he tapped on the door. The pattern was barely forced, not enough that anyone passing would recognise it as a signal.

The feet from inside came fast, close to running, the door flung back to smack and rattle against the inner wall. "El! Jesus, you're here!" It was Lorenzo who'd shown up, and he stepped out right in El's face, all cloth sounds, some kind of arm-clasping or hugging going on. "Shit, it's been too fucking long."

"I know," El said simply, but the words smiled wide. "How have you been?"

"Hey, you know me." The laughter was bubbling up behind his voice, Lorenzo the big eager Labrador, missing only the sound of his tail thumping the floor twice a second. "Quite the set-up we got here now, huh?"

"Well, it's an improvement on the last place, I suppose." El's dry humour bounced in his exaggerated inflection. "Where's Fideo?"

"Asleep right now, I guess." Some of the enthusiasm had dipped out of Lorenzo's voice.

Sands had never taken well to being ignored, especially when he was having a shitty day. "Why don't you just go right ahead and say he's drunk?" he drawled, pointedly sounding as bored by all this as he felt.

"What's he doing here?" Even when Lorenzo was forced to acknowledge Sands, he was still talking to El.

"He offered to come," El said evenly.

"El, you didn't tell your hosts I was tagging along for the ride? Surely that wife of yours must have taught you _something_ about manners." Sands smiled through the following silence to show close on his full set of teeth over El's shoulder. "So good to see you again. Any friend of El's, isn't that how it goes?"

"Don't expect that to cut both ways, not when this shit we've got going on is all down to you."

"No." That was El pushing in through the pause before Sands could launch his offensive. "It wasn't his choice. The fault there is mine."

"Whatever. Looks to me like when he shows up, it all goes to hell, every time."

"Oh, I'm only ever the messenger." Sands held his smile wide open through the words. "What the people around me do, well, that's entirely their own choice."

"And somebody fishes the guys who made the choices you didn't like outta the river."

Sands dipped his head a little and lifted his eyebrows over the shades - his evening was shaping up to be considerably more entertaining than the rest of his day. "So what exactly happens to the people who do things that aren't to your personal taste?"

"Can we come in and talk about this with some food?" El had that quirky humour tinge back in his tones - Sands wondered how long it would hold out. "They didn't have much on the plane."

"Sure, just dump that crap of yours behind the door for now."

Sands decided the invite extended to him, even if reluctantly, and followed El up another small step through the doorway, the cool of shadow dropping over his skin as the foot-echoes closed in around him. Just ahead, the ringing tap as El set the guitar case down on tile, followed by the softer thud of the bag.

"You got much in that case?" Lorenzo asked.

"A very bad, cheap guitar," El said, and Sands could imagine the expression that went with the words. "They get suspicious about people who ship empty ones."

"You're clean?" Lorenzo sounded as appalled as Sands was by the situation. He wasn't exactly unarmed right now in a technical sense, since there were plenty of things he could pass through the scanners that had dual functionality and would dispose of people quite well with the right application, but none of them gave him the sense of security that went with several well-maintained guns and rounds in the chambers.

"Had to be," El said with a quick shrug. "We came straight from the airport."

"Fuck, well the food can wait, come on through and get kitted out. I've got some shit back here I _know_ you'll like."

"We both need weapons," El pointed out.

The pause was there, but only brief, the rustle as the kid glanced Sands' way. "Yeah, we got enough for two," he said. He moved off deeper into the house, feet tapping light and even, El behind him. Sands left his bag by the door with El's, keeping the laptop case with him as he followed. Tile all through the length of the hallway, smooth and ringing under his heels; no change in footing as the walls and echoes fell back into the sensation of space around him, a stronger smell of cleaning fluid and something that lingered, spicy. Lorenzo jingled keys and rattled a door, heavy with silent hinges.

"You keep your weapons in the kitchen?" El asked, trademark desert-dry.

"Why not? Nobody's gonna look for them there." The kid got his sense of humour back fast, didn't stay pissed for long. Maybe he was just that happy to have El show up to help him out. "Handguns, take whatever sparks your burner, there's ammo and clips for the lot on the top two shelves."

Two more El-steps before the low metallic clicks started - he never could keep his fingers off of anything his eyes liked. "Thirty-eights - Glock G28, Walther PPK/S, Smith and Wesson 67." His voice was muffled by the enclosing doors as he ran through the list for Sands' benefit, altered more by the thickening of accent with the shift of his brain into unthinking assessment, the pure speed of thought encumbered by the necessity for words. "Nine millimetre - Sig P239, Tac-Five, Beretta 92FS, G17C, G34 -"

"Somebody likes their Glocks," Sands observed, resting the laptop on the floor against his leg and noting the dips as El slipped further into the shorthand.

"Many people do," El said evenly, and Sands wondered just which of the list was rattling through its action under his fingers, distinctive series of slide-snicks as he worked it. Smooth, efficient sounds under the faint oily tang of weapons, under El's continued listing of the nines moving into the .45s., and Sands' own hands were starting to quiver with the possibility of touch. Several nice weapons on the supermarket shelf, make a choice and he'd have them loaded and with him, everything right back in its place. "Desert Eagle .50 AS..."

His mind jumped and caught on the glitch in El's recital.

"What the hell would these idiots want with the Eagle?" Sands drawled the words out long to carry across the room, giving the derision that little extra kick. "Thirty rounds and your arms are shaking too hard to shoot straight, if the fucker hasn't already jammed when you can't hold the recoil."

"Christ, we don't _use_ that piece of shit. That one we keep around more as a souvenir." Sands let his head glide Lorenzo's way, following the words, the something there in the kid's voice that was actually interesting, something dark and viciously satisfied that warranted some future poking to test just how deep and wide it ran.

But that could stay stored away for later fun. "How many G17s?"

"Just one," El said. "There's a pair of the 34s."

Fuck. It was so much easier to keep track of one style of weapon, one size of magazine and calibre of round, instead of reaching to remember what the hell he had in his hand in the middle of a firefight. "Too big." Pity, he would have liked the higher mag capacity. "How about the Sigs?"

"We've got a full set of the 239s," Lorenzo offered. It was gone already, that licentious pleasure behind his words, a tendency Sands had grown very familiar with, spending the last couple of years around El. "Picked up four as a lot, new pieces."

"Here." Sands swung back, instant to El's voice, the quick movement, the _something in the air_, his hands moving out rib level to catch. Touch of solidity out of nothing, and his fingers closed down with only a barest fumble to drag it into his body, the ridged smoothness against his gloves hitting his brain with the flash of grease scent. He stripped off the gloves and tucked them deep into his pocket, metal cold and unbalanced within his palm as his fingers slid over to find safety and action and empty grip. He checked the chamber with a pinkie tip and cycled the action through a couple of times, fast and easy with no slickness or stickiness at the mechanism - somebody kept it ready to go. El threw him the clip, and it slapped into place with a satisfying double click, all awkwardness dropping away from the weapon as it slid into equilibrium and purpose. The weight of it curled perfect within his palm, the guard settled against his index, fluid and natural wrapped into his skin.

He stretched his other arm out behind him, closed fist to find a countertop - no prints, not here, not anywhere - and it was almost an effort to reach out and let go, to set the pistol away from him, back into the void.

And he was letting himself slip into complete fucking idiocy, because the gun wasn't going anywhere, it would still be right there when he wanted it. He snagged the second Sig from El and ran through the routine, checking and loading against the background of rattles and snicks as El did the same for his own choice of weapons.

"Holsters?" El asked.

"Hey, did you think this was an amateur set up you were walking into?" Lorenzo grinned as he rattled keys at another door and poked around, tossing something to El, caught with a slap and a low metallic ring. "Catch." That last was spoken in Sands' direction, and the kid didn't throw right, didn't have the quick, distinct tell in his motion, but the leather whistled and flapped across the gap, and Sands snapped his hand out right to feel it wrap onto his wrist. He traced the arrangements of straps and buckles - double shoulder holster for underarm carry - and stripped off his jacket to wriggle in and adjust, circling his shoulders to check the feel of it after he slid the Sigs into place along his ribs.

Now he felt in a marginally more reasonable position to be taking on the stinking open drain El called home.

"So what else are you hiding back there?" Sands' fingers worked the buckles, adjusting the straps into the right fit for the weight of the guns, his mind running ahead to other possibilities. "Compact autos?"

"We picked a few up along the way," Lorenzo said, light steps tapping across the room. "Couple of MAC-10s, Micro Uzis, an OTS-33 –"

"Any with silencers?"

The keys stopped, abrupt, the door still sealed. "What the fuck d'you want with a silencer? It screws the accuracy, and only cuts it back to loud three rooms away instead of three blocks."

Sands raised his head slow, angled to let the lenses stare straight on. He could almost feel the shiver-flash across the room, the instant when the kid actually _thought_ instead of letting his mouth run.

The jingle returned, and the swish of air forced aside. "A couple came with silencers as part of the deal. Best of the lot's probably the Beretta."

"The 93R?" Only three round bursts, and he'd never used one, but the reputation said reliable and easy to strip. It was another nine mil too, which kept the ammo simple. He spread his lips, curved thin. "Pass it along."

Familiar boots his way across the tile, and the gun came from El, the dimpled touch of a grip to his fingertips; no tossing an unfamiliar weapon whose weight and configuration were only theory, with the option or not of a stock poking out six inches from the back. Not, it turned out, as he outlined the length of barrel into silencer, under to the folding fore-grip and guard, and back around to the gaping emptiness that waited for a magazine. He found safety and clip release in the obvious places as he explored, and the chamber was usefully designed to be checked for a round by touch without having to pull back the slide - the convenience of a weapon built for special forces and designed with night work in mind. He also found what had to be the selection lever for single shot to burst fire, but he didn't have a fucking clue which setting was which. He'd check that with El later when the kid wasn't around. The middle of a fight would be a bad time to be experimenting, with no idea how much of a kick to expect.

El passed him the clip, the size and weight of it consistent with the twenty capacity his head dredged up from the vaults, and he smacked it home but didn't chamber the round. Unfolded the fore-grip, turned and swung the gun up towards the door behind him - inevitably nose-heavy with the silencer, probably a nicely balanced weapon without. One of the smallest auto-burst pistols around, easy to conceal even with the little something extra screwed on the front. He smiled along its length, feeling the call of it through his finger, the burn to find a reason and test it out.

"Nice, huh?"

He kept the smile in place as he turned Lorenzo's way. "I think it might do."

"There's another if you want the pair."

"Even better." He clicked the round through to the chamber and laid it aside on the counter, taking and setting up the second Beretta.

"You said you had something I might like?" El prompted.

"Hell, yeah." There was a grin in Lorenzo's voice, and a slap as El caught something heavy. "Remington twelve gauge over/under, all shaved down ready to go."

It always came back to the shotguns with El Mariachi - Sands could never get why he fetishised the damn things so much. If he had to use one, he should at least go pump-action. "That's an expensive piece of kit, El. Better pick one of the pistols next time you want something to whack a guy over the head with."

"I think prices are higher for the ones that still have the shoulder stock and most of the barrel," El said, over the distinctive click-snap of a break-open action.

"It's shorter than a side-by-side, easier to hide," Lorenzo said. "Just the one sighting plane, so it's more accurate."

"Only the lateral accuracy," El pointed out. "It pays for it in the elevation."

"El, the last time I checked, you didn't point those things at too many ducks." Sands slapped the Beretta's mag to check it was fully seated. "Elevation's not your issue."

"It is when I'm aiming at a man on a roof."

"The difference doesn't exactly come into the calculation when you're waving it around in your hand instead of using the sights. I think you're still going to hit him."

"If you can miss with that, it's way past time to take the pension," Lorenzo agreed. "Quit being stubborn, El, you only do it for the hell of it."

"Set in his ways," Sands agreed. "It's a symptom of age."

"I'm not so much older than you," El said. "And it is a good gun."

"Just not the one you're used to, right, we got it." Lorenzo sounded about sixteen when he laughed and teased that way. It was going to be interesting, unravelling the triggers, the differences between this version of the kid and the one who kept weapons as tasteful mementos.

"Shells?" El's attempt to divert the chit-chat away from his idiosyncracies was obvious, but it worked on Lorenzo well enough.

"We've got a few hundred rounds of tactical buckshot laid in."

"Ah, yes, tight patterning and low recoil - the optimal choice for home defence," Sands drawled.

"I don't remember you objecting too much to my choice of protection when they were needed," El said.

"I objected all the goddamn time, you just didn't listen."

"What is it you Americans say about fixing things that aren't broken?"

"Just because you mostly get away with that crap you pull doesn't stop it being stupid."

"You would have done so much better, I suppose."

Sands tipped his head and grinned. "Most of the time, I wouldn't have been there at all. I'd have found someone else to do the job for me."

"That only works when there are people like me around." El was running the shotgun through its action beneath the words. "If everyone was like you, nobody would do anything."

"But everyone isn't like me, and I adapt to the circumstances. You inherited a guitar case full of guns, I found myself with some small skill in persuasion - we both learned to make good use of what we got." Sands swivelled on the ball of one foot to face the last he'd heard of Lorenzo - the kid had stayed quiet all through the exchange, there only in the light movement through the room before El snicked the cartridges into place and snapped the Remington closed. Sands had never been all that fond of a silent observer, and he liked them even less now, with nothing in the spaces for him to read. "I'm sure Lorenzo here will agree that you tend to become a little over-enthusiastic at times."

Lorenzo rustled briefly, and he spoke fast and relaxed. "El, Fideo – they're both nuts. I gave up on saying it years back."

It would have been entirely sensible if it had been true, but Sands didn't believe the kid had given up on anything at all. All the detail Sands had gathered when El had hooked up with Lorenzo in Culiacán, everything he'd heard when he met him at Honaker's warehouse - it all said there wasn't much of an idealist left in the kid, but those last, lingering remnants of optimism were tied to his friends.

"If I'm so crazy, what does that make you for coming along?" El smiled. Leather creaked and brushed as he pulled it tight around him and slid the shotgun away.

"A sucker, yeah, you think I don't know? Somebody's got to look after the idiots." The grin was back, oozing through Lorenzo's words. "Now that's got the personal protection angle covered, we can start on that case of yours. You wanna take a guess where we keep the real offensive stash?"

El shook his head, the irregular brush of hair along his shoulders. "Later. We won't need more till we've got a plan, and I still want to eat."

Quick rustle and squeak of shoe on tile from Lorenzo. "Sure thing." He moved past Sands to the door, El following behind; Sands grabbed the laptop from the floor and trailed after. "I'll order in, it's easier. You can drag all that crap of yours out of my hallway and up to your room. Get the basics unpacked, take a shower if you want, and the food'll be here when you're done." Twelve steps from the kitchen doorway, and Sands swung his foot out right to brush against his bag as a double check before he bent to pick it up.

"You can take the room first right, top of the stairs," Lorenzo said in El's direction. "I'll get more sheets for _him_." Heavy emphasis giving the last word a kick, and it was interesting how fast the open hostility had come right back. The whole conversation held an amusing echo of El's slips early on, forgetting just how much he was supposed to hate Sands for the duration of any chat about the weapons. The kid suffered the same enthusiast's weakness for his subject, for someone else with the knowledge to share the love. "We only keep the one room ready, don't wanna encourage too many visitors."

"We only need one." El spoke up fast, before Sands could count in his own slow-drawled response to the kid's bitching, but he kept it neutral and light.

Sands wasn't surprised that El would push the point. It could be read the platonic way easy enough by two guys who knew what it was to fight and run, and Lorenzo's voice held no stresses when he answered. "Fine by me - less cleaning to fight with. I got rid of the maid when we heard we were being checked out."

"You didn't trust her?" El's voice instantly harder, built solid by layers of suspicion and threat.

"I'm pretty sure she was straight, but she could have been threatened. Pity - she was nice to have around, not just good at the cleaning." Sands amended his earlier speculations - obviously the sidekicks weren't running low on cash yet if the pretty boy was levelling his talents at the help.

"Didn't that maid of yours ever get just a little bit curious about all the locked cupboards full of guns?" he asked.

"We told her they were stuffed with paperwork, old records for the taxes. She was easy on the eye, not Einstein."

Sands smiled in the kid's direction, thin and tight. "You know, there's a wide body of evidence that people tend to aim for those at their own intellectual level when it comes to sex. How nice to see it holding true."

A single footstep, fast and heavy Sands' way before the movement froze. "You're in my house, you'd better watch what the fuck you say."

Sands angled his head, stayed with the smile. "And where is she now, this obliging maid of yours?"

"How the hell should I know? Home, most likely, with her two hot sisters and her hag of a mother."

El was rustling just behind Sands, bending, picking up his bag and the guitar case from the floor. "So there's a woman out there who knows everything there is to know about the inside of this place, gossiping her way through the local markets with no idea she could be a target." Sands dragged his lips back in shrunken and small, just a hint of twist at one edge. "She could have spilled her guts and be chilling on ice already, and you fuckmooks wouldn't know it because you're not keeping tabs."

"Yeah, and if we watched, we'd be dragging somebody's attention her way for sure."

"Which is why you were an idiot for having her here in the first place. Your foresight was even shorter than her skirts."

Lorenzo's voice dropped and hardened. "You don't know a fucking thing about her, or me."

Sands let the smile grow, slowly. "You just keep right on thinking that."

"Screw you, I think what I know."

El's feet were already on the first couple of stairs, so Sands lifted his eyebrows and turned to follow instead of answering, to count, to learn. How many stairs to the bend, how many above it, distance to the door of that first room on the right, all filed away and ordered almost unthinking now, the details of stair width and height and composition taking a little more concentration. It was always good to know in advance if stairs were solid, or if someone could shoot through from underneath.

El gave him the fast run-down of the room - enough furniture to be useful, not so much it was fucking annoying to avoid it all, just the way he liked it. They rearranged some to make it a closer fit to Sands' usual patterns, shifting a small table to the bedside as a nightstand. Sands unpacked his laptop and wound out the charger cord, soft drawn-out creak beside him as El sat on the edge of the nearest bed.

"Don't push too far," El said. "He's young, he will snap."

Sands smiled slightly as he re-zipped the case. "If he wants to kill me, he might find it trickier than he thought."

"It's not you I'm worried about."

This time he turned El's way as his smile stretched wider. "Nice to know you have faith in me."

"He wouldn't be trying to kill you," El said. "I'd have to beat you down before you got to him."

El wasn't wrong about that angle of it. If somebody came for Sands, he wasn't going to be swatting them off, or defending himself, he was going to be killing that bastard motherfucker before they got anywhere goddamn near. He wasn't ever going to find himself strapped to any fucking tables ever again.

Not that his reaction would have been any different two years ago; he just wasn't inclined to put the brakes on that way. If the kid was stupid enough to use violence without genuine intent, well, one day it really was going to be his funeral.

"And you'd do that," Sands said, flat.

"I'd hit you both and tie you up and sit on you if I had to." Another soft creak from the mattress under the shift of weight. "I'd prefer not to."

"Well, I hope you plan to have this same conversation with him, because I won't be taking any of your shit over something he starts." Sands held his face El's way for another second, before he crouched with outstretched hand, walls textured beneath his gloves as he felt for the socket.

"He knows how things stand," El said, and that deliberately wasn't answering what Sands had asked. "Three right."

Sands' fingers swerved, hard edge of plastic instantly there, flawless smooth contrast to the dry roughness of the wall that caught at the leather. He plugged in the cable, quick low bleep from the computer as the charge fired up. "Good. Then he won't be starting anything, and you don't need to lecture me."

"No lecture," El said. "Just the truth."

A truth that already had El threatening him when they'd been here maybe an hour. Sands twisted back to level El with the non-stare, expressionless and set. "Well, while we've got Honesty and Bluntly Forthright standing here in the middle of the room, let me tell you just how much you don't want to take that line of truth any further."

"I just don't want any of my friends to get hurt." El's fingers touched light at his cheek, and Sands pulled back and up onto his feet.

"Then you can tell your 'friends' that if anyone does, it won't be me." He turned, orienting himself for the doorway, and walked easily from the room.

So much for the shower option, but after his explorations of the room and the furniture-dragging session, they'd lost close on half an hour and the food would be showing up soon anyway. He counted his way down the stairs, and leaned against a wall in the hallway at the bottom. The only room he knew from here was the kitchen, and that would be a pointless trip, since nobody was cooking.

It was only a minute before boots tapped on the stairs behind him. El passed him, unspeaking, and Sands fell in a few steps behind, shadowing the uneven motion as El paused to check doorways.

"Hey, El." Lorenzo's voice came from along a ways, and muffled by wall. The kid had good ears, then; nice to know if he was gonna have to work with him. "Get your ass in here, I'm just gonna go grab us some plates, food should be right up." It was notable, that singular ass, but Sands decided to consider himself invited along too.

He let El take the lead, moving towards the words – Sands could have tracked it himself, but El would avoid any crap that got in the way of the direct route.

El turned into the obvious doorway and slowed, a smooth stop so Sands didn't run into him. "You should have warned me your tastes had changed, I'd have dressed for dinner," he said.

"You think I like this shit?" Sands supposed there'd be a face to go with the distaste in Lorenzo's voice. "I mostly eat in the kitchen, this is just a place to bring somebody I'd want to impress."

"You don't want to impress me?" El laid on the mock-hurt with the kid a bit thicker than his usual style.

"If I did, I wouldn't try it with furniture," Lorenzo grinned. "You said you were hungry so I ordered half the menu and figured we could use the table space."

"That sounds good, as long as the menu wasn't pizza."

"Nah, there's a restaurant down the hill - great place, they don't normally deliver, but the owner likes me."

"This owner, she would be female and forty?" El asked.

"Closer to fifty," Lorenzo said, the missing wink bright in his tone, "but damn, she can cook." His feet came for the doorway, pushing past Sands like he wasn't there to head off down the corridor, presumably hunting down the plates.

El pulled back a chair with an unmistakeable scrape, and Sands moved over to his left, reaching for the chair that would be there and finding the back at hip height. El was just as useful with a pistol with either hand, but he had better control of the shotgun kick with his right, and he liked that side clear.

Sands lifted his fingers to the table in front of him, finding its edges, its depth and weight, a solid carved wood that slid polished beneath his gloves. The cutlery and a glass were set out unevenly, tossed into an approximate place setting in a hurry, and he straightened them into his two hands' width square.

Footsteps from the hallway behind, tapping _different_, not the kid, and El was already moving, pushing back and up from the chair - but he was loose and easy, and the kid's steps were there too now, casual rhythm unbroken over the tiles.

"Fideo!" El laughed as the feet met the doorway. "I was starting to think you might be avoiding me."

A shuffle of shoe from Fideo, and he called back towards Lorenzo in the hallway, "Is he here or is that me?" Still not exactly sober then, and it wasn't just the half-joked words that said it; something too subtle to be called a slur, but there.

El-motion, fast, the two strides to cover the ground then the slap of body barrelling into body. "So does that prove to you I'm here?" El's grin was thousand-watt bright even to a blind man.

"Okay, okay, I believe you! Now get off of me." More sounds of cloth and feet as the two men untangled, then "Him too, huh?" It wasn't said with malice, or any kind of interest at all either way, just an observation made and filed. So the sidekicks hadn't reached a consensus of feeling on the subject of Sands after their last little meeting – that might be something fun to work with.

"El says he offered to come." Lorenzo's quote held enough hostility for the both of them, but Fideo didn't bother with an answer, just grabbed a chair across the table.

Oh, yes, definitely fun for the future.

"El also says you didn't go into a whole lot of detail when you put out the call." Sands was growing rapidly bored with the whole male bonding chit-chat deal. "So in the absence of food, how about you fill us in on what exactly we're walking into here?"

Silence of a few seconds, a couple of low rustles, enough for an exchange of looks and some agreement. Seemed like Lorenzo was elected spokesman, and as ever he aimed his voice at El. "That guy you offed the end of last year, he had fingers poking into just about every pie baking in Mexico, and some of his business friends weren't happy to find their arrangements fucked over. They've got prints from you that tell them El Mariachi, but that part they'd already figured. And they've got prints from _him_ that go right along with a face and a name."

It wasn't any kind of surprise. Sands had briefly considered torching Honaker's storage before they left, but they'd still have lifted his prints from the plane or the dump they'd dragged him to in Chiapas, and even that much was only the back-up confirmation for the chit-chat of Honaker's surviving thugs who'd run out early on the party.

Christ, he was starting to feel like El. Kill one guy to get them sliced out of your hair like so much sticky bubblegum, and it only made ten more show up gunning for you. "Would you tell me again just why the fuck we should be back in this cesspit you call a country, El?"

Nobody answered him, not that he'd expected one.

"Far as we can figure, they've still got shit on you, El," Lorenzo said. "Too many rumours to get close to the truth. But some of the questions they asked got answers, and those answers brought them here, on to us. We're just a sideline interest right now, one of a half a dozen tracks they're headed down, but that's gonna change."

"Which makes it first order idiocy for us to walk in the front door," Sands pointed out. "So why exactly are we here?"

There was a pause then, quick, not enough to be a blip on the radar with most people, but there was something in it Sands knew he'd missed. El had interactions with these dicktards that weren't in his repertoire with Sands, a completely different code of wordless signals that didn't involve any kind of sound.

"We can't get to the fuckers," Lorenzo said, the words too fast, a pathetic attempt to cover the gap. "None of us can." He threw in the emphasis hard on that second part when Sands smiled. "We could take a few of them with the right plan, but not all of them, not fast enough before the others could move on us."

Sands was still smiling; he didn't see a reason to stop. "You're making it all a lot more complicated than it needs to be. There'll be an instigator, one behind the group of sheep, whipping up the enthusiasm and prodding the others along with his inspired-sounding plans. Take out the activist with enough of a dramatic flourish, and the rest will get the idea and go home."

"And how do we know who it is?"

"I'll find him for you," Sands said simply. "I take it you already know who some of these people are?"

"We've got a list of names, yeah," Lorenzo said.

"Then it's easy. You just need to know the right people to ask."

"He can do it," El said when Lorenzo didn't answer. "If they're there, he will find them."

"You've got a lot of confidence there, El. Hope you've got something to back it up."

"He found me," El said.

"Yeah." Sands could hear in the bitterness just how far that fact crawled down the kid's throat to get stuck. "Back when he had the whole fucking CIA behind him. Right now he's been in this country maybe two weeks outta the last year and a half."

High, two-toned jangle of a doorbell, classic noir movie style, and that had to be another pretension, like the furniture. No way this house would be older than thirty years or so, built some while after Acapulco had sprawled into the hip place to be.

"That'll be the food." Footsteps as Lorenzo was gone back down the hall, Fideo scraping to his feet and wandering after him. Sands wouldn't be offering to do any fetching and carrying, and El was more than smart enough to stay clear of visitors.

"I get the feeling your friends don't like me much, El," Sands said with a quirked smile.

"That would only matter if you wanted them to." Instant clipped answer, all the tension in the flat speed of the words. So El was already starting to tire of playing mediator for this little game – well, he should have thought about that part before he decided they were coming to stay. Sands lounged into the back of his chair, into the high solidity of the wood along his spine, let his gloved fingers slide slow along the carved contours of the table, a curve still at the edges of his lips.

Lorenzo didn't have anything more to add when he came back to the table, losing himself in the rattle of bags and aluminum scrapes. The hot scents flash-flowed across the table, drowning out wood and furniture polish and El in a wave of tomatoes and garlic with lower undertones of herbs and chilli. At least the smell of it lived up to the kid's advertising.

A slight glitch in the pattern of El's breath, air flowing out a little longer before he drew it back in. Not enough to be real tension, just... a moment.

Sands swung his neck around slow, but he didn't hear anything that broke the mould of the last couple of hours, not from the door and not from where the windows had to be in the external walls. Nothing from the sidekicks, either, not that he'd know their subtle tells, but Lorenzo was scratching at a container casually enough, and the drunk was breathing low and slouched like the bum he was.

Sands uncrossed his ankles, feet flat to the floor, slid his ass nearer the edge of the chair.

"Here, grab this." The kid passed plates down the table via El, and Sands set his dead centre of his square of cutlery, checking with a quick outward sweep of his pinkies. Motion from El's right hand, his left arm unmoving alongside Sands, then the quick, high screech of tines on a plate, so different from the ringing clatter of knife or spoon.

Sands reached for his own fork, sliding it in from the edge of his plate till he hit food; push against the pressure half a fork length, lift against the weight, but the sense of resistance, of something _dragging_ was out of place, the tug on his fork oozing away slow and uneven like something –

Something that fell into place with the mix of smells.

Fucking fideos. The bastard-fucking, beetle-licking Mexican had given him a plate full of fucking noodle 'soup'.

He lifted and angled his head to give Lorenzo the full effect of the glasses and hinted smile for just a second, _challenge accepted, donkey-sucker_, before he shifted his interest obviously back to his food.

Noodles, right. Some food types were trickier than others, but it wasn't so tough. There was a consistent pattern to it, same as there was to everything - lift the fork against the drag, wait for it to come loose as some of the strands fell away. Twist the fork, three, four times was usually good, tilt and shake a little if it still felt too heavy; he didn't want to be opening wide like a goddamn whale every mouthful, but he didn't want to smear tomato gloop all round his face either. Small amounts worked best.

So much concentration and effort just to goddamn eat without looking like a six year old.

Every fork was assessed slow and careful, measured and balanced against the last. No way was he gonna screw up in front of an interested audience, and the spectators were obvious enough – El would be watching, sure, because El watched everything and Sands liked him that way, but the real giveaway was the absence of any bland hilarity. The kid hadn't managed to keep quiet longer than a minute around El since they'd walked in the door, and now the dinner table was all scratching forks and clinking glasses and eyes.

Sands would have liked an update on some of those eyes. El to Lorenzo, vaguely reproachful probably, nothing too sharp, all too predictable. The real interesting one would be the dipsomariachi – clued up enough to pick up on the issues, obviously, since he was keeping it shut too, but was he taking a side in the table rounds of eyeballing or was he still playing the neutral observer?

Sands lifted and twirled his fork, listening for Fideo, for the liquid slosh that came from that seat more often than the others between the scrapes of metal on plate; feeling for the slide and tug through his fingers, raising the fork higher as the weight dropped back, and El's hand was at his thigh below the table, the quick, deep pressure of two fingertips through his jeans. The signal that said, 'Wait, not yet' when they were close to ambush, and the meaning hadn't changed, only the context.

He wondered if there was anything at all left wrapped round his fork, or just a single lonely strand hanging on by a twisted quirk of gravity.

He tipped and angled the fork back down to the plate to be sure before he pushed back into the pile and this time El's fingers eased away as he rolled it.

The noodles oozed soft over his teeth when he chewed, sliding down his throat in thick, soggy balls at each swallow. He supposed it was good, spices combining into a slow-heated kick at the back of his tongue, but it was a little tough to be fully appreciative of quality when the mechanics of eating sucked all his concentration and he'd been designated the meal's main entertainment.

It didn't matter whether it was good or not - that camel-cunted kid could've laced it with gunpowder and Sands would've been sure to gag down every last greasy strand. Or at least as much of it as was practical, because even people who had eyes looked like idiots chasing the last stunted pasta strands round in circles.

The strained silence with himself as the central attraction was more than irksome; it wasn't going to tell him anything he needed to know. He set his fork down on his finally empty plate and turned to Lorenzo with a faint smile. "Well, that was a truly unexpected treat. So what's next?"

He'd figured for more sniping from Lorenzo, but he got Fideo's input instead, too loud, laced with the supply of spirits. "Yeah, Lori, what else has your sugar mommy cooked up for us this time?"

"Hey, you got that one all fucked up." Lorenzo was just a bit too quick to jump in and defend his reputation for a guy with his back-story. "I figure I pretty much keep her in tips, right along with half her staff."

"The young and pretty half?" El was smiling again, his words rising and falling exaggerated. "Or do their services include cooking too?"

And that was the mariachis off into what seemed to be their usual rhythm, pointed banter fired back and forth like the studied silence of the fideos had never been there. Somewhere through it, Lorenzo unpacked the next course, which turned out to be a perfectly simple, though something above average, chalupa. None of the rest of the food came deliberately booby-trapped, and either eating or El seemed to improve Lorenzo's mood, as the chatter and the joking ran constant and circular around.

Sands stayed back from it while he ate, tracking the back-and-forth conversation of the mariachis - lots of reminiscing, old stories he didn't give a shit about, but he needed to find the nuances, the patterns in the interactions, the way the influences ran between the three. It mattered on a tactical level, who would question plans and who would sign right on the line without eyeing all the small print, but it was also about the threat, the pressure from all the angles, and what might give.

Sands finished eating while the others were still scraping irregularly with forks between all the chatter, and pushed his plate aside to clear the space in front of him. He peeled off his gloves, unholstered one of the Sigs and ejected the mag, pulling back the slide to kick the round from the chamber before he eased it forward off the frame. None of these guns needed cleaning, but it had been a while since he'd handled a Sig, and he wanted to remind his fingers of the habit of the basic strip. Plus, he'd like to demonstrate some degree of competence to these bozos before he started fumbling with the unfamiliar Beretta and made himself look an idiot.

"How d'you know you're not sitting there in full view of the neighbours?" Lorenzo demanded.

Sands tipped the glasses a little his way, and smiled. "I didn't, but you weren't too concerned in the kitchen earlier. I figured you guys might have paid the extra for a little privacy when it was needed, and if not, well, you'd be up on your feet right now and grabbing for the blinds."

"Why should I do shit like that for you? I'm not your fucking servant."

Sands shrugged and turned back to the pistol. "They're not my neighbours." He ran his fingertip over the mechanism and along the barrel, every metal surface flawlessly smooth with the lightest hint of oil. Only what he would have expected when El respected these people's dealings with weapons, but he reassembled it and then checked the second Sig anyway, because it was just good practice.

The oil left a faint grease over his fingertips and the hint of old gunpowder to go with it. Okay, he knew where the kitchen was and there'd be a sink to wash his hands in there somewhere. He was fine with groping just as long as the sidekicks stayed out of his way.

He tucked the gloves under his arm and lifted his chair back to stand in a practiced single motion.

"Bathroom's second right back along the hall." The kid's voice coiled as grudging as ever even when he was being helpful, and Sands smiled tight.

"That will be nice to know, when I decide I need it."

He went to the kitchen, picking up the count of steps from where he'd left off at the dining room door. Knuckles light against the doorframe setting a measure to start from, he walked across the tiles to find the countertop he'd set the pistols on earlier, trailing the back of his hand along it as he walked the room until he hit metal. Easy.

Finding the soap was a little harder, but he tracked it down in a dispensing bottle, something with a lavender scent that lingered on his hands and washed out everything else from his nose. It figured the maid had done the shopping too.

He didn't bother trying to hunt down a towel, just shook his hands off and left them to drip.

Counting back to the dining room was faster, more accurate this time, aided by the conversation and laughter, and he shifted his weight off-centre to lounge against the doorway, deliberately casual and confident. He reached into his jacket for a new pack of smokes, stripping the plastic free and peeling back the foil.

"Don't smoke in my house," Lorenzo snapped. "Go outside."

Sands tapped the end of a cigarette lightly on the carton, then threw the pack over to El, quick rustle and slap as it was caught. "What about El? Can he smoke in your house?"

"He gets kicked out too."

El slipped the pack away in a pocket, and Sands smiled slow. "What's this we've got here? Another reformed addict living in fear of corruption?"

Lorenzo sniffed out air sharp down his nose. "Never touched the fucking things. And neither should he." That last was spoken pointedly in El's direction.

"I'm not going to be earning a living with my voice anymore," El said. His tones could almost have passed as neutral, just a little too much care behind the choice of words.

"Well, I still do."

"I didn't think you earned a living by anything now." Sands waved a hand slow across his body to take in the expanse of the room, the house.

"It's what I do," the kid said. "I _like_ it. So piss off if you're gonna light that thing."

_'__Don't push too far.'_ El hadn't had the opportunity to have that particular chat with his sidekicks yet.

He'd let it slide, for tonight.

Sands could retrace his steps to the front door by the route he came in, even if it wasn't the most direct, but what was outside the door beyond the path they'd walked up was all a wonderful shiny mystery. He hadn't used his cane since he got here, and he wasn't starting now, not for standing outside in a Mexican street in full view of fuck knew who. He stuck the smoke between his lips but didn't reach for the lighter, let his smile shape round the filter. "And here I forgot to pack the bug spray. I find mosquitoes strip all the fun out of nicotine." Familiar changing pressure as he spoke, the length of the cigarette wriggling and angling from his mouth almost as good as the drug.

He pushed away from the doorframe, point made. "Well, much as I'd just love to spend an evening kicking back for a pleasant chat with you guys, I believe I have a job to do." He pressed his lips together and curled them towards Lorenzo. "I'll need some basic information to work from. Please tell me this place has some form of internet access."

There was a pause, just long enough for Lorenzo to look to El and get the okay, which was severely fucking irritating. Sands wouldn't get anything done if these people were gonna be double-checking every basic demand before they granted their 'permission'. "Wireless networked, secure, the whole place," Lorenzo told him. "Set yourself up and I'll give you the password."

"I'm already set up."

"Fine." Lorenzo's tone was distinctly piqued, but he coughed up the relevant info, and Sands shifted his attention to direction and distance, to the appearance of effortless as he counted through the doorway and to the stairs. He didn't let himself reach fingers for the banister, for the double-check, till he was damn sure he was out of everybody's line of sight.

At the top, he angled and headed for that first room on the right, slowing as he approached the door, a little wary. He hadn't closed it, and El knew better, but who the fuck knew what those other two morons wandered round their house doing?

His hand found only air and frame, and he circled his arm out wide as he stepped through to make sure the door was still pushed right back against the wall.

The laptop was on the table where he'd set it, the chair undisturbed from its position a hand's breadth out, the checks fast and automatic. He started the machine, background thoughts tracking as it bleeped through its initial routines.

He hoped Lorenzo knew what he was talking about when he said the connection was secure. These guys were shooters, not techs, but they'd got the cash to pay the right man to set them up. Which meant at least one person out there had a way into the system. Hopefully their porn-viewing habits had bored him enough that he'd given up on taking a peek. Sands couldn't imagine Fideo and his tequila-brain finding anyone willing to fuck him the conventional way too often.

He settled in and lit himself that cigarette - he was in his own room, and he'd opened the window a few inches for the cooler evening air. The kid had no excuse to bitch.

He entered the log-in details Lorenzo had given him, dragging in smoke through the seconds of the connection.

The lilting, exaggerated tones rose up from the floor below, carrying easily through the open door; enthusiastic chatter, rushing sentences cutting in over the end of the last, breaking down into massed laughter.

The computer announced itself logged in, and Sands let the smoke slide from between his lips as he considered the subtleties he'd gained on El.

He laughed a little more, the smile in his voice flowing easier than the dry, fire-blackened humour he most often showed to Sands; but he still walked with his feet sliding the barest hint of air above the floor for low impact on singing tile, still reacted and tracked every new hint of sound from outside for that half second before experience wrote it off as harmless. Sands had figured it that way, but it was always nice to have it confirmed. Even here, relaxed with people he entirely trusted, people he read as both safe and competent, El was a killer. He was too much the Mariachi to ever be able to dial it back to plain old peasant Pedro or whoever the fuck it was he'd started out as.

Sands didn't give a shit about the name. El had been aware of Sands' full range of options for a while now, but he stuck with 'Sands' for all uses and occasions, when he bothered to use a name at all, and Sands didn't see any other tag displacing 'El' in his own repertoire. El was El, and anything else was just so much gold plated curlicue drawn across the grenade.

He fired up a search engine, slid in an earphone and started working his way through the list of names Lorenzo had given him. The information he had available through public channels was never going to be interesting enough, but it gave him a place to start. Let him put together a picture of people, left hints of where the dirt was likely to be and what kind suited their palate - the neat, tidy, white-collar financial discrepancies, quick to slide down the throat without gagging, or something a little more hands in the potting clay. Clues on who he should be looking at for the impetus, the power-seeking climber behind it all. The guy who was snapping to take Honaker's place at the top of the pile wouldn't be a shy and retiring type.

It was slow, tedious, and fucking frustrating work. He'd long since learned the internet wasn't quite the friend it had been before (because 'before' never needed qualifying, oh no, even without a capital B, it was the alternative befores that were in need of a tagline), but he still got seriously pissed about the number of sites that weren't even close to compatible with his software - links based in images not words, totally fucked up layouts with overlapping text the voice synth couldn't read when he cut the images out. Local rags in the Spanish-speaking world weren't all on board with the latest disability access guidelines.

Christ, he could use El around for this.

His nose itched where the sweat gathered under the frame, the dampness lying sticky and trapped all along his cheekbones. It had always been like that, from the minute he got off the United jet in Mexico City four years ago, but it had never irritated him like this when he wore the shades by choice, as part of the game. He reached up to rub beneath, pressing with fingertips through the damp, then snatched the glasses away and set them on the table by the laptop.

He could have stripped them off the second he walked through the fucking front door - he'd got no investment hanging on what El's mariachi band thought of him. It was just so much habit now that they lived clinging to his skin like a goddamn Alien face-hugger everywhere outside of the shower and bed.

He pulled up the pages that gave him hits on the next name down the list, settling back while the synth read haltingly through the articles. Boring shit mostly about charity donations, business mergers and share prices, and the pattern of underlying voices from the floor below him was changing - Fideo's deeper foreign tones had died out a while back, probably passed out slumped in his chair, and what was left ran softer, delays between words instead of all scrambled together overlapping. Nobody had laughed during the last couple of minutes.

He'd left it long enough now for the conversation to have turned interesting, and he needed to piss anyway. Nobody had gotten around to telling him where the bathroom was on this floor, so he'd open every door he came across and tap on the walls till he found the small space with the tiles.

The bathroom turned out to be just a couple of doors down the hall, and he left the door open so the voices stayed with him. No words from here, just the sounds and patterns, the broken rhythm of exchanges between El and the kid.

He flushed and washed his hands, walked obviously back along the hallway to his room, then altered his steps to creep onto the stairs as the sounds came into focus, Lorenzo's voice rising with more than just proximity. "Sure, you got bored of wearing the scorpions so now you drag one about with you instead."

"He guards my back."

"That's the best you got?" The bitterness almost burned through the kid's words. "Fuck, El, you don't need a pet psycho for that, we'd do it any time you asked."

"I know." El's voice was low, serious, only Sands' familiarity with the man letting him catch the words.

"But you're trusting your life to a snake, one that strikes blind."

One of those long pauses, the ones that meant El might get around to an answer or he might not. Sometimes the mariachi took a while to make up his own mind which, and when he did talk now it was slow and careful, still figuring out the words. "When Sands dies, it will be because of the choices he made for himself, not because of mine."

"That's it? You'll hand yourself over to a vicious, self-absorbed crazy instead of your friends because you don't want to feel guilty?"

"Don't you think I've done that enough?" Hard note creeping through into El's voice, defensive in most people, more like a warning in him.

"Screw that, I'm starting to think you like it." Lorenzo didn't seem to take warnings too well, from anybody. "This is just another line on the guilt thing you're eating yourself up with right now. If the guy had his eyes, you'd have ditched him the second you took out those fuckers who knew where you lived."

"Maybe." _Maybe?_ Nice to know El was right on deck with lying to his friends - he'd tried kicking Sands out goddamn hard enough the morning after, not giving a shit he was blind. "That might have been part of it once. Not so much now."

Little Lori was definitely pissing on the wrong tree with that angle. When Sands had been at his most pathetic, El had treated him with a determined loathing suitable for a particularly large and iridescent beetle wriggling in the soup, and that didn't leave room for a whole lot else. El's attitude had actually been kind of refreshing after the bubblegum kid's constant, irritating attempts to be helpful, though Sands might have enjoyed provoking him more if he hadn't been spending so much of his time wondering just when the mariachi was finally gonna snap and kill him. By the time El had worked his way around to respecting him, Sands had damn well earned it - there was no space for pity at the Sands-El party.

No, El was keeping him around as the companion without consequence, so he could pass on the whole sackcloth and ashes deal that had headlined so often in his life. But the sidekicks had skipped a lot further down that particular road than any of them probably realised, and it wouldn't take El's actual presence now to have the Mariachi curse swinging the Death-scythe at them.

"So if you don't feel sorry for him, what the hell is it?" Lorenzo demanded. "He's too much of a shit to like and he makes a lousy choice of back-up."

"He's better than you'd think." Something of a smile in El's voice, that almost-buried humour seeping through. "You can't know without seeing him. He's... inventive. And he's fast."

"Fast, huh?" The kid sounded genuinely curious.

"Fast enough." El switched out to steel tones and unshakeable fact. "He's fast, and he's also blind. Don't ever forget that. He acts like he isn't, but you should not."

That quick huff of air from the kid's nose again. "Yeah, the more you talk, the more it just keeps on getting so much fucking better."

"You should be grateful his reactions are good. It's only because of them I was able to stop him from shooting you when you ran into that warehouse."

Oh, yes, the moment when it would all have been so easy. Sands had stilled his finger at El's shout instinctively, before his brain had reconsidered, but El would have felt that extra half second gap and known what it meant.

Right now, the decision was looking like it might have been worth the risk.

Lorenzo sighed. "Fuck it, like it matters, he's here now." His voice dropped and softened, losing the edge. "Just do me one favour, okay?"

"Apart from being here?" El teased.

The kid ignored the baited switch to humour. "Watch your back. Don't trust him."

"You're a bit too late for that," El said, simple fact.

Short pause, and Sands could imagine the kid giving El the Stare. "You're a fucking idiot, you know that?"

"I told myself that sometimes." El was smiling again, the quick humour that flashed twisted through his words. "It didn't seem to help."

"You really trust him? All the way, no doubts?"

"With me, yes." El's answer was immediate, and certain, all the amusement stripped back. Seemed like he flashed though the moods with everyone, not just because Sands pissed him off. "With anybody else...."

"Right, gotcha. That probably works out better when he's staying at your place, not mine."

"He won't harm you." El's degree of confidence on that point was actually kind of irksome, since it was a decision Sands hadn't quite finalised yet.

"Not with a gun, no. He'll just yank on the strings in our heads like he did with yours." Nice to know the kid wasn't buying into it either.

"He couldn't have made me do what I didn't already want," El said.

"Wanted and decided not to, yeah," the kid pointed out.

"You don't ever change your mind?"

El changed his mind all the goddamn time, that was the problem. It was never easy, but he'd sway to the right pressure, and fucking Christ knew all his decisions were driven by some pretty chewed up thinking.

"It wasn't a mistake," El went on, softer now. "Marquez needed to die, in spite of my promise. Carolina would have understood, for our daughter's sake, if not for her own."

"Shit, yeah, she would've flipped and iced the fucker a year before you did," Lorenzo said, affection and humour a neon flash through his voice. "Fine, you had to take the bastard out, I get that. But the rest of it, later, you had to do all that too?"

Another of those El-pauses that stuttered with the careful thought. "Maybe not. But I had to do something."

That was it, right there, the chink, the flaw for the chisel, and now would be a really good time for the kid to ease off. Stop the pressure before El got genuinely pissed, leave him to tick along with that one admission that maybe not every choice he'd made around Sands had been the ideal.

"Okay, you win, I'll take that for now." So the kid knew El more than well enough to catch on too. Sands would have had to admire the skill, if it wasn't set up to deliberately undermine everything he had in mind for himself. "But just... make sure you think around him, okay? Don't let him go poking you into anything."

"That's advice you should probably be giving to yourself."

"I'll work on it if you will," Lorenzo said, the grin laser-bright through the words.

"Deal," El said instantly. "So why don't we prod Fideo awake and get back to the game?"

"Sounds good to me, he'll be an easy mark," Lorenzo smirked. "Hey, droopy, wake up and play the round before we finish off that bottle for you."

That seemed to be the interesting part of the conversation over, and Sands eased his way slow back up to the top of the stairs. It gave him a little something extra to work with, and he wondered how much useful detail he might have missed out on before he tuned in.

It was intriguing that El had opted not to include the tequila-head in the conversation.

He walked into the bedroom, and this time he wrapped leather-clad fingers round the edge of the door, swinging it back behind him to close with a soft click. He stripped off his jacket, letting the cooling air to his body through his shirt - this room had the same aspect as the dining room, so no curious neighbours peering in at the guy with all the holsters - and tossed it onto the nearest bed. Settled himself into the chair and lit another cigarette, trickling the smoke slow and burning through his throat and back into his lungs.

The laptop hummed its low existence from the table, the rush of the fan against the evening's warmth, and he set his earphone in and restarted the last article he'd abandoned. He rolled the cigarette back and forth between thumb and index finger, twirling regular with the run of his thoughts when it wasn't settled at his lips. Words and sentences stuttered heavy and slow into his brain, jagged contrast to the talk and laughter rising smooth from below. Muffled now by the extra door, but the voices still there, the mariachis relapsed into the base pattern of flashing speech that rose and fell with protest and counter-accusation. Fideo a little off-pace, a whole gravel trap of drag against the excitable over-dramatics of the kid, El pouring commentary flowing and even-paced over the both of them, and the computer was reading words into his head that he was tracking only as sounds, not as meaning.

He'd been awake too fucking long.

He wanted El around for this, wanted the words that would keep up with his mind, thoughts and opinions to bounce his own from and balance them. Wanted El leaning in behind with a rush of breath past Sands' ear as he peered at the screen, arms folded across the back of the chair and pressing along Sands' shoulder blades, the close brush of old smoke and fresh gun oil wrapped around the physical presence that flared in his head from across a room.

What he wanted was to fuck El's ass, and hard, hold El's body settled and heaving beneath him, beneath his hands, but he wasn't so sure how El would react to that suggestion right now. He'd run the confrontational route over the sleeping arrangements, but he might just turn head-shy at taking it that way with mariachis two and three on the other side of the walls.

If he had to, Sands would put in the effort to soften him up a little first. He could do a lot with El's cock in his mouth, and once he had his fingers in El's ass, the guy was sold. But it would be better without it, because he really wasn't feeling too patient right now.

His cock was shifting and stretching at the sensation-flashes in his head, and he reached down to rearrange because an erection trapped pointing south wasn't a comfortable thing.

They didn't fuck now as often as they used to. Oh, they still fucked enough, because hey, they were guys and they liked it, but it hadn't been the automatic ending to a day for a while now. Part of that would be the novelty wearing off, because everything got old in the end, even fucking a legend as the finale to a Sahara-style dry season. Some of it was the change of lifestyle that meant they weren't always in bed and awake at the same time, Sands' schedule fixing round the flow of information and ideas as much as the clock. And the rest of it was the change _from_ the lifestyle, because there was just something about being shot at nearly every single goddamn day that made Sands want to fuck his own brains out.

The laptop beeped at him, querying the inactivity, a prelude to sinking into sleep mode, and he reached to tap a random key to keep it awake. So far, he only had one name that supported further investigation, an implausibly smooth character whose questionable business developments got the go-ahead rather too easily from the local planning departments, and whose acquaintances covered an expanded range of social respectability, but he still had a few more on the list to check. The faster he got this shit squeezed through the wringer, the sooner he and El could get the fuck out of this miserable camel spit country and back to a more comfortable lifestyle.

He set the search engine running on the next name down the list, discarding the first entries after half a summary and cursing everybody who'd give their son a name as stupifyingly uninspired as 'Jose Sanchez'. The tenth sounded more promising, and he settled back and let it run. The breeze rippled past him from the window, shifting and rising with the change in temperature, playing over the sweat gathered beneath his arms and along the holster straps.

El's voice carried through from below, and with it the instant jump-and-catch in Sands' head, the mind-shift as his brain adjusted priorities, his ears reaching to separate that one sound from everything beyond it, for words, for mood, for meaning.

The process was so automatic, he only registered it when he stopped to think, to consider how things worked, and right now El was taking up a lot of his thought-time that should be sticking with the business at hand. He wondered if he'd even be able to change it now, if he wanted to. He'd trained himself so deliberately into that awareness of El, where he was, what he thought, what he _sensed_, and he had no idea if the process was reversible.

He killed the synth voice that droned through the 'phone into his head. He always worked better fixing on one angle at a time; anything else just got in the way of those all-important fine details, and his brain was inclined to centre on a different one for tonight.

He tugged the plastic from his ear, dropping it to the desk with a clatter, and pushed with his feet, rocking his chair onto two legs, his head hanging back over the rest.

The wood caught at the leather of his shoulder holsters as he slouched against it, and he pulled at the straps till the Sigs' weight settled telling and comfortable against his ribs.

Another break in the chatter from below, the soft low noises of town, of distant people and traffic forming his background from the open window. The breeze ruffled beneath his hanging hair to touch cooling at his neck.

_Footsteps_, base of the stairs, moving his way - El.

The fingers of his left hand were on his shades, gone there instant and unthinking in the half-moment between sound and recognition. He started to lift away, then stopped, the curve of the plastic warm, still damp against his palm.

He curled his fingers round the frame and pushed them in place across his nose, spun the chair to face the door as it opened.

"I was wondering when you'd finally be through with the reunion chit-chat," he said. "You know, you could have been making yourself useful in here instead." Technically it was true, though if El had come earlier it would only have meant Sands getting laid that much sooner.

El hadn't moved from the doorway, even before Sands drawled out the first word - the Mariachi's instincts that had kept him alive over ten years didn't dial down to 'off', not even with a long term lay, just a low simmer setting that kicked into full flame at the first whisper-lick of tension.

El took those extra couple of steps into the room now, neutral and even with his voice. "If you want my help, you only have to say."

Sands didn't ever say. He didn't have to. El just did.

He propped his elbow on the arm of the chair, circled his hand and fingers slow from the wrist. "They're your friends. I don't care what happens to them either way, I'm not going to be begging on their behalf if you don't volunteer."

"I'm not asking you to beg," El said, the words clipped sharper this time, distinct with the gaps between.

Sands gave a twitched half-smile. "Well, that's good. Because you really wouldn't like the results." He uncurled himself onto his feet, took the two strides between them to plant his hands on El's chest, leaning in with weight and momentum. His palms met steel, tension through muscle and body, the moment of instinctive resistance to force before El's brain kicked in and allowed it, his body flowing with the pressure to slam back against that section of wall Sands had found right by the door with no furniture and no annoying pictures hanging in the way. Low grunt of air lost from El's lungs with the impact, and Sands used the sound to steer his lips in, because there were a whole lot of things in Sands' world that got a whole lot better when he had his tongue in El's mouth and El's body pushed up against his own.

El stretched out an arm, hooking the door closed in a swish of air and a harsh slam.

El was the lingering spice of onion and tequila with the heat around Sands' tongue, and the pressure of skin rough and scratching because neither of them had shaved since before they'd left the apartment two flights and twenty hours ago, and that was just fine because Sands was giving it as good as he was taking it, and he wasn't looking for soft or delicate. El's hands were on him, firm through his shirt, pressing him back, the lips under his own moving slower, looser to force a change of pace, and that was predictable, El's attempt to strip the edge off him, ease this down a level, and it wasn't gonna happen, not this time. Sands hooked his fingers deep into muscle, sucked that pouting lip in between his teeth and bit down - not hard enough for blood, because that just tasted lousy, hard enough to pinch and bruise. Hard enough that El's grip on Sands' arms tightened into a burn as he dragged his flesh away, that he sucked in breath fast over Sands' cheek.

There was a moment of only the breathing, heavy, loud from both of them through open mouths. Panting silence, close, and then El's mouth was back on his and entirely with the game-plan, a fast, slick pressure and his fingers still ringing flame above Sands' elbows. Sands leaned in with more of his weight, El trapped against the wall behind, the lines of El's teeth and his own running against his lips under the kiss. Pushed his knee into the gap between El's, rubbing thighs and dicks together through their clothes, and El let the wall hold him, hooked an ankle round Sands' to drag his leg forward and out till Sands was forced to shift his weight or fall.

El wouldn't back off. He knew how it was, the kick of it, unleashing all the bitter anger and tension through the sex. El had fucked Sands that way often enough, and Sands had taken it because it was El, who was as efficient and casual a killer as Sands, and because even through the drive and the bruising fingers, El could be relied on to hold back enough not to cross a line. And mostly because it felt pretty fucking fantastic, and somebody who could push him far and hard enough to make him want it that way was an unusual find.

El lived in the flicker-flash of violence exactly where Sands did, and Sands was willing to let that work for him whichever way. Not the actuality of it aimed in his direction - he knew more than enough about real pain not to go eroticising that shit. But the dark, vicious potential twisting right there on the surface, all reined in check because of the control Sands held tight in his own hands, the control over that other person, that worked his buttons just fine.

El knew it all, knew exactly how this was ending, and he wouldn't back off yet because he knew too how much more satisfying it was to have that someone else push back. All that knowledge and possibility spread against Sands, the stretch of muscle over heaving ribs beneath the shirt, the drive of teeth and tongue under his lips, under his cock as the press of hips returned against him, near-flawless violence and chaos wound through the body of a man who wanted him every way he could take him, and Sands wanted in.

His hand curled at El's neck, holding him while he drew back to leave space between their bodies, the edge of teeth against him, the brush of skin over his nose, fabric crumpling into his palm as he dragged at El's layers keeping him out. Never casually physical any more, not the feeling good and getting off that sex had always been before; the world was sucked into his head through his skin now, flashing through his brain starved and desperate for every scrap of detail, no off-switch outside the dampener of cloth, of gloves. Round, warm, metallic imprint of studs _sharp _and heavy under his thumb now as he fought open El's jeans, denim rough over the cock stretching and changing for him, moving into his hand as he pressed in and down past snagging, coiling hair and belt-line ring of sweat, damp, warm, sliding.

El's hands pulled at his own clothes in turn, stripping guns and shirt from him with the easy, relentless efficiency El applied to everything, and naked would prove useful later so Sands moved with him while his own fingers hooked and fumbled at the buckle of the holster for that goddamn shotgun. El's touch met his on the leather, reaching to help, and Sands slapped him away, dragging his other hand from El's cock to get the fucking straps _off_ and the clothes with it, pressing his body back to El's, to hair and sweat and heat. El was movement under his hands where everything else was static and safe and dull, once-touched-always-known while the world shifted through its thousand changes around him, and Sands claimed its movement through El, dragged the world's physicality into his own with the rise and stretch of ribs at his palm, the bunch and slide of muscle against his thigh.

One hand at El's jeans pushing down, the other back on his cock, on skin gliding smooth within the curve of his grip, jerking him all the way hard and then some, fast. El's fingers wrapped around Sands', dry and rough over his knuckles, slowing the movement to draw it out, and Sands flicked off the restraint and grabbed El's arm to turn him, pushing him face flat against the wall, hand between his shoulder blades.

El stilled beneath his palm, all easy tension against the wall, and Sands leaned in to scrape teeth down the length of his neck, because El was just a bit too comfortable with this.

The reaction was flawlessly fast, El twisting down, out from under his grip; Sands grabbed low, finding shoulder instead of biceps, pushed his knee to the wall to stop El's predictable sideways slide and hooked his arm around, hauling El upwards by the armpit. El back against the wall but facing outwards again, hands gripping Sands above the elbows to drag him close, breath harsher, its warmth driving heavy on the curve of Sands' cheek below the lens before El pulled him the rest of the way. Lips on his, dry, pushing, scratch of stubble over his skin, and Sands had his hand free to wrap round El's dick again, picking up right where he left off, and his tongue pressed into El's mouth as a bonus to the deal. Flash of tequila snapping across his tastebuds, and fuck, he'd missed that, the rush of it burned into his nose with El's breath, El's body fluid along the length of his own as both of them manoeuvred and slid for the angles, a shifting coil of strength and instinct. Pressure met with its counter, teeth met with teeth, every application of force drawing the equal response before El ultimately tired of the game, of pushing back against this thing he wanted, let his body flow loose and compliant beneath Sands.

El Mariachi stretched bare against the wall, all slack, restless muscle and hard, even breaths, willing for anything Sands chose to do to him.

It was an illusion that would fragment into violence if Sands persisted in anything El didn't want. But Sands knew how to make him want.

He drew El from the wall, guiding him round and back till El's legs met solidity, pushed steady against his chest so El took the hint and dropped onto the bed, thud and creak of mattress under the weight. Sands stepped forward to find that edge and slid himself up the bed alongside, fingers stroking the length of El's body as he moved, hair and skin and scars uneven beneath his calluses from guns and cane.

Sometimes Sands wanted to press El down onto the sheets and fuck him till he stopped ever fighting him. But El wouldn't ever submit completely, and if he would, he'd be boring.

He reached out to sweep the hair back from El's ear, scratch of stubble at his palm as El turned into it. Ran a hand slow along El's ribs and down, leaned over him close, the press of the shades shifting lighter from his nose with the angle. "Not this time," he said, slow, quiet, and curled his fingers into a grip at El's waist and _pulled._

El rolled fast with the pressure, easing much of his own weight, curling his legs up as he twisted. His body lifted beneath Sands' hand to settle on all fours, and Sands arched across him, pressed against the length of bone and tight flesh and sweat. "Better," he smiled, stretching to shape the sound of it to El's ear as breath, warmth, felt the bare shiver along the spine beneath him.

He reached for the tube placed earlier on the nightstand between the beds, squeezing gel out cool onto his fingers and smearing it down. One hand settled itself at El's cock again, working him steady and deliberate as other fingers pressed in to lube El's ass ready for him. Not stretching, not loosening, only the basic practical matter of pushing past resistance to get the slick in, because a dry fuck just wasn't any fun.

El hunched slightly beneath him, muscles bunching along spine and thighs where Sands leaned into them, quick, clenching spasm onto his fingers, but he didn't pull away.

Sands supplied El's cock with a little extra flick, rolling fingers damp with lube across the head at the tip of each stroke to keep him hard before he pulled back to add more. One last wet press of nails and knuckles into barely-accepting flesh, then slicking up his own cock, his breath shifting deeper at the quick taste of contact.

El was still and waiting, no twitch through the mattress beneath Sands' knees while he smeared the oily film along himself.

Tube back capped and neat on the nightstand, and he shifted closer into El, more pressure against the inside of hair-curled thighs till El obligingly spread himself wider. Reached out fingertips to rest light between El's shoulder blades. "Lower," he said, tones flat and empty, his hand following the ridge of spine as El flexed down onto his elbows.

He eased forward, resting his weight slow along El's body, one hand dropping to the bed to steady him. "More." Almost a whisper this time, breathed cool onto El's neck between the parted strands of hair, fabric slippery under his palm, the lining of his jacket he'd thrown there earlier, crushed now beneath El as he pushed him down.

El slid his arms up beneath his head, flattened his chest to the sheets and stilled again.

Sands' lips curved soft at the edges as he dropped back onto his knees, freeing his hands to spread El and position his cock. Holding himself against the tightness of it, easing hips forwards, pressing in slow through the long outward rush of El's breath.

They didn't do this often enough for El to find it easy, and Sands liked it that way. His deals were a whole lot more entertaining when the guys on the other end hated him, feared him, and swallowed the baited hooks he offered anyway, the conflict bitter in their voice, stiff in every twitch of muscle. And here, now, El wanted Sands, had wanted it from the second he'd opened that door and known it was going to happen, but the biggest kick was feeling El fight his body to take it. The tension through the shoulders beneath his hands, along the spine arched up against the length of him, the resistance he pushed against, Sands' pressure held steady, not sharp, but uneasing till El forced his flesh to submit, to relax and accept him.

The grip around his cock, the barrier he pushed against, impenetrable and then abruptly _gone_, his body dropping forward the last inch.

It hit him again, every time, never quite remembering just how fucking amazing this was, hard-on full length into moist and willing flesh.

He trailed a hand up the inside of El's thigh to double-check, his nose not good enough to tell El's horniness from his own, running his fingers over skin still stretched tight around his balls and onto his cock. There were definite advantages to fucking a guy with near-flawless control over his body, used to ignoring and working with pain at a level that made anything Sands gave him a gnat bite.

He slid his hand along El's cock, curling it into his grip when it pressed at his palm, working El as he began to move, jerking him light and fast, because Sands wasn't gonna hold back any and drag this out, but if he was investing his efforts in making El want to stick around, he was at least gonna make sure he got off.

His other hand strayed over El's body while he fucked him, tracing the lines of muscle across his belly, the shifting tensions at his neck with Sands' rhythm on his cock, following the altered planes as El eased and settled slow and moved into him, Sands leaning in to breathe heat across the path of his fingers. El always seemed to be hot for that kind of thing, but more to the point, Sands liked it too – liked the quick shiver of flesh over El's ribs, liked the sweat in his nose and beneath the slide of his fingers, the proof wherever he touched of El's response to him, his influence over each inch of this body.

And goddamn whore-loving Christ, he really liked _fucking_ him, the natural-rising rhythm in his hips with the flare of nerves through his balls, and finally, Jesus, finally, El shuddered and lost it, heaving with broken breaths beneath him, and Sands could let go. Distilled sensation, pure input, no analysis or question, pushing himself into the heat and pressure of another body that moved with him and for him, reaching with him, this one instant when there wasn't _anything_ fucked up in his world, every sense natural and unforced in the driving rush of the need to _come._

It lasted till the shakes quit his body and his balls hung soft, and once he would have opened his eyes.

It wasn't the shock it used to be, his mind falling back into a body that was blind. He was long past forgetting; hell, he was past even dreaming it. It was only good to have something left unchanged, the fractional pinpoints of time uncorrupted by the desire to see.

He was sprawled along the sticky arch of El's back, his fingers still clamped round El's left shoulder. He loosened his grip, the curved indent of a nail in El's skin sweeping beneath his fingertip as he straightened, and he wondered if he'd left other marks too, curling red and bruised down to El's collarbone.

He still had his socks on, his feet sliding without resistance over the sheets.

When he pulled out, there was a faint sour smell clinging beneath the lube and come, and Sands wrinkled his nose. "You might have said you weren't clean."

"It wouldn't have stopped you," El said, "and I didn't want you to think I was saying no."

Anything that looked like El was backing out on him would only have pissed him off more.

Sands stripped off his socks, hung a towel from his waist and went to the bathroom to wash his cock.

El followed behind him to clean up too, and Sands brushed his teeth and left him there. He picked out the Sig holsters from the pile on the floor and dropped into the other bed, the one that didn't have sheets smeared with lube and come. And thinking about it, his jacket too – fuck, he'd need to get that cleaned.

El didn't seem so keen on the soiled bed either when he returned, snatching up the other pillow and squeezing in alongside him, though Sands wasn't exactly making an effort to move over and make room. El's head pushed in beside his ear, stray hair draping forwards onto his shoulder.

El had too much hair for sleeping with, or for fucking - it hung limp round his neck and slid forward over his face, and Sands never knew exactly where till it was catching on his fingernails or getting between his lips and the particular piece of skin he was aiming to suck or bite on. But its length added detail to his world-picture too, the low-rustling brush of it over collar as El turned, the swish of an automatic denial he chose not to speak, and Sands would easily trade a minor inconvenience for information, for the knowledge he craved, needed to make his choices.

El wriggled closer into him, pushing a little for more of the bed, light itch of chest hair rubbing against Sands' arm, the angle of a hip pressing into his skin.

There were times when he missed curves and softness. Not that there was anything much wrong with El's general physique, but women were different, and Sands liked them too.

He didn't plan on doing anything about it - even if thinking it didn't give him the creeping twitches all down his spine, a casual fuck wasn't worth risking his life on, no matter how tight the ass or well curved the tits filling his palm, and it probably wasn't worth annoying El over either. Sands wouldn't expect El to pitch him a jealous fit - the arrangement they had going here wasn't exactly steeped in romance - but it would be a potentially literal pain in the ass to kick off the Latin macho trip. He could live without the pissing contest of proving who could outclass who for horniness.

He liked it well enough, the way El's body worked against his, the changing textures of planes and muscles and scars under his fingers, the scratch of hair brushing with the sweat over his skin. He could unleash the sex when it was El in a way he was pretty sure wouldn't work now with a stray fuck, when he'd be just a bit too distracted wondering if he was gonna get stiffed by a knife or a needle instead of fingers or a cock.

It had been a good screw tonight, one of the more inspiring sessions, and Sands had snatched only a few raw hours of sleep hanging around airports over the last day and a half, and he really could be out of it by now. Unfortunately, his day wasn't done with yet, not for either of them, because El should have been right on the edge of sleep, curling into him with slowed breath, arm draping over Sands' stomach. Sands had long since given up on pushing it away. Instead, El lay pressed along him with the hint of tension through his body, the regular, controlled rise and fall of his chest that went with thought.

The air stirred slow over Sands' arms, the sultry remnants of breeze from the still-open window.

El rolled up onto an elbow, one broad finger drifting slow along Sands' shoulder, following the waving path of a strand of hair across his skin. Silent and watching.

So now it was time for all the tedious probing as El tried to figure what had triggered this little session. Sands didn't get off that way so often himself - all that sealed in anger and frustration was more of an El specialty. The Mariachi had obviously never gotten much training in the exercise of patience.

Easier to deflect before El actually made it around to talking.

"You told me he asked." Sands drew the words out slow and flat, and nothing like post-coital. It made a little too much sense when looked at from a certain angle; the lack of a pick-up at the airport, Lorenzo's reaction at the door, the precise phrasing of his words, the silent something that had gone between when Sands asked Lorenzo why they were here.

The finger stopped its trace, sitting still and heavy over his collarbone. "I said he would come and help me if I asked. He would still come even if I didn't."

Well, that was interesting. And pretty much all Sands needed to fuck this fuck-up even more was El deciding to start making clever with words.

"I seem to recall you getting pretty pissy with me one time over the things I wasn't saying. Something about me getting kicked out on my ass on the nearest street corner."

A twitch through the hand at his shoulder and the touch curled a little deeper. "I'm sorry."

"For then or for now? Either way, you're really not."

"I.... This is important. I got them involved in this. Now I have to fix it."

"So the little lies of omission are just fine when you think it's important. Well, I'm glad we got that all cleared up."

"You couldn't have talked me out of coming," El said, the words low and almost reluctant.

Sands knew that. And he would have come anyway, which was the only reason he wasn't considerably more pissed about it, because El's choice of conversational shortcut hadn't changed a thing. But it was useful to steal some of the moral high ground out from under El every now and then; it was a good time to go poking for information. "Well, now that we're in this cosy shithole together, why don't you tell me, El, just how close are you to friend Lori?"

"What do you mean?"

El always could be a little slow to catch a shift in direction. "Well, I don't mean did you fuck him in the ass, because I know you didn't do that kind of thing before you got your hands on mine, so what I mean is exactly what I asked."

"Like you said, he's a friend." El's voice was coloured by puzzlement still, and the inevitable tint of curiosity. "He knows how to handle a gun and how to handle himself, and he can be trusted completely." A pause, before his words softened and dropped. "I don't have so many of those left now."

Every word of it truth on the nail, and none of it telling what Sands was asking. "Such a good friend, yeah, and one you only bother to keep in touch with when there's trouble. Whatever happened to all those calls just to say 'Hi'?"

El shrugged the shoulder he wasn't leaning on, weight shifting beside Sands. "We're busy men, we have our lives." Faint brush of sound and altered angle of the words as El tipped his head. "He sends messages sometimes."

Sands smiled, deliberate. "That's telling phrasing, El - he does, you don't."

"What are you trying to say?"

"I'm thinking maybe there's a reason you don't stick around with your friends, and maybe it's more than you not wanting to take turns playing babysitter for the alco-drain."

The mattress creaked and shivered under him as El settled back onto it, his arm matching up alongside Sands' in layers of muscle and bone.

When he spoke, his voice was pitched to the ceiling, not at Sands. "I promised myself once that I'd keep them out of my life, and then I broke that promise."

Flash of El whispering as he waited in a church confessional, thinking no-one was there to listen, and Sands smiled. "You seem to do that a lot."

"Not a lot, but... it always seems to be the important ones."

"So, our hosts here are good enough friends for you to want to protect them from the curse of El Mariachi," Sands summarised. "Not so good that you actually put what's best for them before what's best for yourself in the end, but good enough that you're still half-trying to keep that promise." He turned his head on the pillow for El's benefit, let the edges of his lips curl upwards, tight. "Sounds to me like you've got some confusion going on in there, El."

"No confusion," El said. "Things change, and sometimes none of the choices are good ones."

"So it's a basic policy of steer clear that alters with the whim of the moment? You run too much of your life that way, El, you're supposed to get past it as you age."

Soft pillow sounds, and El was talking to Sands again, the humour back. "I change my mind too much, I've been told that once already tonight."

Sands gave him a wide, lazy grin. "I didn't think you'd miss me. Clearly Lorenzo did, or he'd have yelled the roof off."

"You weren't so obvious," El said, light. "I don't know how long you were there – I only knew at all because I know you."

"And you didn't stop to tip off your little friend? I'm proud of you, El, that almost counts as deceitful and underhand."

"Like you say, he would have yelled the roof off, and I wasn't in the mood." The humour was still there, but something darker, more like warning, beneath it. "Neither of us had anything to say that you didn't already know."

Well, that was debatable. Oh, most of it he'd guessed or assumed, but sometimes the phrasing of the confirmation added quite a lot. "The brat got the same crap from you I did, that's all I'm interested in," he said, flat. "If he doesn't hold back in his little games after tonight, I certainly won't."

Dip-creak of mattress, transmitted shiver of movement and El's hand touching light at his elbow. "I know you didn't want to come here," he said, words sober and low. "Thank you."

That kind of statement of the obvious didn't need a response, and Sands rolled over onto his side, a more comfortable position squashed into a small space with someone else.

El's hand moved with him, resting still on his arm, but he didn't push closer.

Sands kicked the sheets loose from the corner of the bed. He hated feeling pinned down, enclosed.

The neighbourhood was quiet; no cars, no voices through the drifting minutes, just the air and the cicadas. Always the freaking goddamn cicadas. The town felt un-lived in, but for the bugs. And his pillow was too thin. He pushed at the edges, so it fluffed into more of a hump in the middle.

The way his schedule had been all screwed up the last twenty-four hours, his brain didn't have a fucking clue whether it was night or day out there. He needed to train his melatonin levels to cue into cicadas.

The sleep-anywhere mariachi, of course, was already lapsing into the slower, even breaths of sleep, and Sands resisted the urge to kick him awake. El would only want to talk more, poke through the shit that was bugging at him.

If he had to be awake, his brain ran better without fending off El's curiosities and concerns along the way. Especially when it was El he needed to get the full detail topographic chart on; El and just exactly how the links between him and the sidekicks ran.

Sands had picked up real early in life that he wasn't the same as the people around him, that everyone else he saw was interacting on a level he didn't even have a concept of. He'd watched and studied, and he'd learned that certain behaviours consistently got certain reactions, and that giving the expected responses to the cues allowed him to fit in, to pass as their defined 'normal'. He knew there was a starter path required by society to get what he wanted out of life, so he went through school and snagged his degree with no more than a couple of minor glitches in his record, the kind any smart, bored teenager could rack up.

By then, the act had started to wear kind of frayed-to-threadbare on him - he'd long ago figured out most everyone was a hypocritical jerk when he dug deep enough. If people would be so quick to turn on him if they knew, why the fuck should he even bother with them?

He was the way he was, and if the world didn't like it, well, screw them all.

Through the years of watching, of insinuating himself, of deliberately tuning his own reactions to get the right ones from others, he'd learned exactly how to hook people in, which was enough to keep them around for the couple of weeks or months he might need them. He'd never bothered to learn how to keep someone's attention for longer.

He'd never imagined wanting to.

That was okay, he'd always been a quick study, and like any problem it would be resolved by the application of logic. He only had to work out what it was El wanted, and then give it to him.

Starting from the top of the pile, El wanted his wife and daughter back, but that was somewhat outside Sands' scope and likely to be counterproductive anyway - he didn't see himself fitting in too well with the family reunion. Even if he discovered the secret to godly miracles, he'd probably skip that one. Not that it was relevant either way, because godly miracles would give him back his fucking _eyes_ and then it'd be sayonara Mariachi - though El had turned out to be useful in a number of ways, beyond having eyes, and it might be better to keep him around, just in case.

El had wanted revenge, but the mariachi had scratched that one from the list himself. He could be enticed back into it, as effortlessly as Sands had done before, but El would know exactly what he was doing, and that wasn't the kind of interaction Sands was looking for. And nor was the lifestyle.

El wanted music and books, but he had those perfectly well without Sands. Sands talked with him about them sometimes when the conversations ran that way. Attempts at anything more would look as instantly artificial as they were.

El wanted contact. He'd pushed that all along, right from the time they first screwed, slowly, constantly demanding that extra boot tip beyond where Sands had drawn the line. And Sands had let it keep on sliding because there was no particular downside to it, and he'd found that, blind, he slept better that way. Because touch gave him knowledge from El and about El that he couldn't get any other way, and it was better if all that shit looked like El's plan. But Sands already touched El, in bed and out - it wasn't something that needed thought, it was there, a result of living and interacting so closely and the sensory requirements of Sands' shrunken, restricted world, bounded now by the limits of his hearing instead of the distance given by sight.

He could take those everyday touches and change them, make them less casual, leave them lingering to speak more about El and the physical association between them. But Sands had already discounted sex as a plausible hook to keep the mariachi in the longer term. Sex was something the guy could get anywhere, after all, and with someone who had a nice rack of tits up front and looked just as good without shades. If El was feeling out of practice, Lorenzo could easily give him the run-down on the latest pick-up lines.

Sands couldn't imagine it now; or actually he could, and it made his flesh want to crawl away and tuck itself deep inside his bones. The idea of some stranger's hands moving disconnected and anonymous on his skin, people now the disembodied impressions of words and breath, footsteps and the reaching movements of their arms. Fingers sliding over him with the rest no more than shifting rustles, and no cues to read on where those hands would stray next, without their eyes to tell him what they were thinking and planning....

Not that he'd been able to tell when he could see, that had been proven in a definitively pointed way, and it only made the thought of walking into a bar and choosing someone _blind_ kick-start his gag reflex like a ten inch cock shoved up against his palate.

Of course, paying for sex got you anything you wanted, including no touching, but no point in paying if he could keep better for free.

If.

Sands didn't know what El wanted.

Sands hadn't been a whole lot older when he'd figured out the things he considered exceptional about himself weren't often the qualities other people found appealing, though on balance it was likely El would appreciate one or two of them more than most. El was with him now because fighting back with Sands was better than a miserable existence moping around a pile of dust and graves, and because the slow business tour of foreign climes with Sands, where people actively trying to kill them were an intermittent inconvenience instead of a constant hazard, was a big improvement on both.

El had to be worked on slow, took his time coming round to a change of plan, and that had been an irritation that occasionally made Sands just want to shoot the bastard back when he'd been wasting months of his life sitting around all day in the grit and the sun, but now the inertia was playing entirely in his favour. So long as nothing disturbed the status quo and Sands deflected any better offers that might look like coming El's way, he had some time to work on figuring out the 'want' part.

It had been easy enough to hook El when Sands decided he wanted him around, to draw the man to him in the absence of anyone else. He hadn't even needed to engineer the isolation; El had already done all the hard part for him. But it wasn't enough to hold him indefinitely, not when El had other friends who'd keep in touch, the little sidekicks who hadn't even needed to click their fingers; one cryptic warning call and El had dropped his life and come running. Christ, El's scope was wider even than that, if he ever considered it - he could fit himself in with people anywhere. Clear of Mexico, and anonymous in the life Sands had handed him, he didn't need a killer for a companion.

With most of the women Sands had screwed, it would have been easy. Keep buying them flowers, dinner, jewellery, and they'd stick around to keep taking. But El was no closer to the average sap-mook than Sands was himself, and he didn't have much in the way of reference points from which to interpret a guy who sailed so far out of the shipping lanes. The man he'd first met had been laughably simple, all that rage glittering through so many tight layers of repression, just ready and waiting to be peeled. But El reinvented himself time after time, shifting his whole life right along whenever the currents changed, and it wasn't always easy to follow the flux and know which facet of the man he was dealing with.

Mostly, he liked the fact that El could still sometimes puzzle and intrigue him. Right now, it was proving to be something of a bitch.

The whir of the laptop fan had disappeared a while back as it dropped into sleep mode, and Sands reached out to push the lid closed, tidy and no risk of accidents. Alongside El, that machine was the most vital link he had to his own survival.

The layers of sweat had cooled with the touch of the air, and he was sticky and cramped, his head starting to ache with tiredness while his brain circled restless, his body trapped by the conflicting urges.

He wriggled himself out from El to sit on the edge of the bed, finding the towel he'd folded alongside. Breeze shifted and tickled soft over his reaching fingers, bringing little sound from the night, only the insects in the trees or bushes rustling too close to the house; no people, no activity, no _innocent_ activity that wasn't deliberately trying to lose itself in the background.

He pulled the window shut, locked it with a definitive click, and went to take that shower.


	3. Chapter 3

Interactions in the house slid into a pattern over the next couple of days, and with somewhat lower friction levels than Sands might have predicted, given the range of less-than-flexible personalities involved.

Sands spent most of his hours with the laptop, reversing the daily arc of the sun from bedroom to kitchen to dining room, taking over any useful surface that kept the crawling heat from his skin. El sat hunched by his shoulder much of the time, running through pages of text far smoother than any mechanical speech, skipping and summarising, Sands pushing for more detail when the words nipped and dragged at his brain. El wandered off sometimes, his disappearances followed by rattles and slicing thuds from along the hallway, later by the sharp scents of onion and achiote merging into the heat of food. Cooking had been part of El's routine for years now, for himself alone and then for the two of them; Sands supposed it was almost automatic, and Lorenzo made no effort to stop him.

The kid had tried hanging around Sands' choice of shared space on the first day, lurching into the fast back-and-forth dissection of information with idiotic questions about what exactly they were looking for and how the details pieced together. El had answered him the first few times, explaining with ridiculous patience that they wouldn't know a goddamn thing till they found it, before Sands lazily suggested the kid should fuck off and find a gobstopper to suck on, a sentiment El had backed in more placating terms.

Sands had no idea what the kid did with himself to pass the days after that, but he didn't much care. That willingness to keep El happy and stay out of their way was a big influence on the overall absence of tension. It was mildly entertaining to bait the brat with a few pointed comments over food, but generally Sands had too many things taking shape in the corners of his head to waste the time.

They didn't see a whole lot of the dipso. While Sands found Lorenzo's enforced presence irritating, he would have liked to have Fideo around bugging his ass considerably more than he was. It was tough to run an accurate profile on a guy who was never there to hook a line into.

The kid wasn't so hard to figure out - he ran on money and sex, like most people his age, even if he did have that pleasantly useful little vicious streak threaded right down the centre. Fideo - right now Fideo ran on booze, but Sands wondered what else was squirming stifled under the liquid coating. There had to have been more to his motives once, and that was still there, if somewhat dehydrated. The drink obscured it, made it a little harder to find, but the answer to that particular mystery might tip the scales one way or the other, an influence in his favour or against, and it was one of the big things on Sands' extensive 'need to know' list.

The dipso drank till he passed out, then woke when he got half-way sober. He showed up for meals if 'sober' happened to coincide, but he had the alcohol-seeker's casual disregard for calories that didn't come in liquid form, eating on average once a day, unless maybe he got the munchies in the night. Fideo's nocturnal wanderings drove Sands nuts the first couple of nights, the slow tap of surreptitious footsteps over tile creeping through the house, setting every nerve in his body dancing on the high tide of adrenaline, till he picked out the faint slur and scrape of sole in the tread and learned to ignore it.

Fideo's sleep patterns were even more fucked up than Sands' own, and Sands was at least making the attempt to keep a routine.

Lorenzo tried to talk Fideo out of his room now and then, mostly around meal-times - concern for his friends was the last lingering virtue to pollute his otherwise suitably dissolute character, exactly as Sands had predicted. Sands' curiosity had teased him away from the frustrations of an El-less keyboard on the second evening to tag along. Sometimes information came in unexpected little packages.

Lorenzo didn't bother to knock before he opened the door, which was interesting. It got Sands to wondering just how easy the kid was in his choice of fuck. Two guys living alone in the one house - maybe the sidekicks wouldn't be so surprised when they discovered his sleeping arrangements with El didn't involve separate beds.

The air from the room was thick with drink, and stale, the heavy fumes of tequila and a cleaner, purer spirit Sands couldn't quite catch, but there was no movement or words at the intrusion. Sands made a quick choice to stay outside and settled himself against the wall across the hallway, feet crossed at the ankles, head tipped back to the plaster.

"Hey, Fideo," the kid called from inside the doorway. "Time to get that big ass of yours downstairs for dinner, El's cooking his red mole chicken thing."

"I'm good here." Fideo's words came slow and deliberately shaped. Rustling followed, and the distinctive chinks of glass on glass. "Not hungry, I'll eat later."

"So skip the food, we're gonna run through what we know about these guys," Lorenzo tried. "Bring the bottle, you can drink it just as easy while we talk."

"You got somebody for us to shoot?" Hint of curiosity, roused interest there under the slur.

"We've got it narrowed down some, we're still working on the last few," Lorenzo admitted.

"So let me know when you do." Fideo's words slumped back into bored stupor, low beneath the clinks and the liquid slosh. "Just say the word, an' I'll be right along."

The kid turned with a scrape of sole, the long experience that labelled this particular visit a lost cause. Sands aimed thinly-curled lips at Lorenzo as he pulled the door to a soft-clicking close behind him. "Why not just smash the bottle and drag him out by the hair?"

He expected the kid to snap at him to mind his own fucking business, but he only shrugged an indifference that had to be faked. "Why bother? He won't eat if he doesn't want to, and he won't be taking in too much detail right now either. We can fill him in on the names when he's sober."

Sands lengthened his smile a half inch. "He'll never be sober."

"Close enough," Lorenzo said. "He's talking more now, so he's cutting back. Another couple of days, he'll be good to fight."

So the witless blob across the room had been the improving version - score another check in the column for El sticking with Sands. "I can't believe you trust a guy who resents putting down a bottle long enough to load his gun."

"I can't believe El trusts a guy who's in it for himself, all the way," the kid bit back, much more the predictable Lorenzo, and Sands smiled at him slow.

"Obviously I've got hidden charm." He hadn't teased anything useful about Fideo from his little visit, but he knew now when to get to Lorenzo with his defences briefly on the glitch.

"Yeah, _that_ I'd like to see," the kid muttered, already walking away towards the stairs. "You can quit hiding it any time."

"Oh, I only do that for people who can make it worth my while," Sands said softly, and straightened away from the wall to follow the rising, warm tint of chili back to its source.

El was in the dining room, already dishing up food – clearly these Fideo-interactions never lasted long, whatever the outcome. "How is he?" he asked when Lorenzo reached the door.

"He talked some," the kid said as he dropped into his chair, which was the truth, if the edited highlights version.

"Talking, but not eating. He's getting worse." El didn't bother making it a question.

"Maybe he wouldn't if you were around more." Sharper edge to Lorenzo's words this time. "He's got some respect for you."

El shook his head, slow. "If anybody could stop him, it would be you. He makes his own choices. We all do."

"That's it? He's drinking himself to death while we watch, and all you can say is it's his choice?"

"What should I do?" El asked quietly. "Do you want me to pray? Get angry and shout and swear? If it would change anything, I would."

"You'd have done it anyway when I first met you."

"I did a lot of things once that I thought would help," El said, flat. "I learned that nothing ever does."

"You won't even try."

"He's an addict," Sands pointed out, quick, dismissive wave of his hand from the elbow. "It's a brain disease. You might as well try and cure him of Alzheimer's."

Smooth rustle of cloth from El, quick movement, and Sands reached for the light weight that slapped and slid on the table beside him, finding a pack of cigarettes. "That would make Lorenzo the only one here whose brain isn't sick," El said.

Sands took a cigarette from the carton, twirling it between his fingers. "You and me, we choose our addictions, stick to the ones that don't fuck with our heads. Him?" He turned his head half Lorenzo's way and smiled. "I think he just hides them better."

"I know you're saying that 'cos you expect me to demand just what the fuck you mean by it, so I won't," Lorenzo snapped.

Sands just stretched his smile a little wider. El didn't pick them too badly; at least the kid caught on fast. "As for the alco-brain up there, well, he likes his addiction a little too much to want to stop, and since good judgement and logic are rarely features of the condition, that's not going to change." He flipped the cigarette around between his first two fingers and slid it back into the pack. "Frankly, I don't know how you've lived with him all this time."

Half-amused huff of breath from Lorenzo. "I don't, when I can help it. Fideo's got his own place, he moved in here when we heard somebody was taking an interest."

"Nicely confirming that you're the kind of people who know and react when you're being watched," Sands drawled. Still, scratch one possible theory on the mariachi sidekicks – it looked like they were going to be scandalised after all. Or at least the kid was; the dipso was probably too far gone to notice, or to rouse himself enough to care if he did.

Lorenzo hadn't risen to chew on that last piece of bait either.

After just a few days, the kid was rapidly losing the only positive aspect to his existence. The basic research was as brain-shreddingly dull as ever, and playing with the kid had been the only passable form of entertainment for Sands' off hours that didn't involve El's dick.

The ongoing tedium of too many days trapped in one space with his world centred on a computer had the inevitable effect on Sands, his nicotine consumption shooting back up close to the levels of eighteen months ago. Sometimes it seemed unfortunate that his last drug of choice had been selected specifically for its inability to numb his mind. He smoked in the bedroom, and in the kitchen, another room Lorenzo never bothered to go near since El had taken charge of the catering. When they actually got around to launching the offensive, El could stock up the brat's ammo for him if he couldn't stand to spend five minutes in the armoury. El predictably stuck with the kid's edict and smoked his few daily cigarettes somewhere outside in the yard.

Sands had nothing in the way of local contacts, and he liked to keep it that way, but there was a whole ocean of revealing information available as a matter of public record. Newspaper archives were wonderful things for finding out which local businessmen or their hirelings had been arrested, and on what charges, and the names of the lawyers they hired to get those pendings dismissed dug tunnels into so many other interesting details.

With El's help tracking the words through the maze of websites, a few days was enough to scratch most of the names from Lorenzo's list - pathetic worms, vindictive enough on their own solid ground, but liable to wriggle into hiding when there was trouble offing, not go looking to poke sticks at El Mariachi.

When he was down to three names, he'd burned through all the indirect options, and the investigation needed to get a little more personal. Not something he'd been looking forward to, when the names on that list knew exactly who Sands was and how he operated. This mission was going to require a particular degree of subtlety.

Subtlety did not include the brat.

"No," he said, flat. It was pointless to elaborate; the kid wasn't coming, and discussing it only ate into time he had several better uses for.

Inevitably, Lorenzo wouldn't get on board with that plan either. "Why not?"

"I don't want you getting in my way." Simple and honest, not that the kid would appreciate that, any more than he appreciated Sands' words when they were carefully chosen for effect.

"Screw that. If they mark you, you'll want the extra gun along."

"You're insulting my professionalism. And El's," Sands added, since that was more likely to make an impact. "We've managed just fine without you all this time."

"And now you're going sniffing round people who know you're alive and are looking out for you, it's not the same."

Sands flashed Lorenzo a quick, suggestive smile. "How lovely to know you care."

"He has a point," El said from the sofa. "It can't be the same."

Oh, that was just perfect. El finally decided to participate in this little bout instead of judging from the sidelines, and he was weighing in on the kid's side. "So the solution is to have two of us there who might be recognised instead of one?" Sands snapped. "If he drops out of sight, they're going to wonder why, and they're going to look around that much harder. He has to stay here, and he has to be seen."

"You saying you can't deal?" Lorenzo challenged. "You're such a pro, if you can work your shit out, I can be a lot more an asset than liability."

"He's saying we need you as a distraction, a decoy." El spoke fast and certain. "We need you to keep them looking here, at you, instead of at us."

Not exactly how Sands would have phrased it - he was fairly sure he didn't need Lorenzo for anything - but it was good enough to shut the kid up on that particular subject. And as a bonus, he'd managed to switch it around and have El take his part, something Lorenzo needed to take note of and get in line with, because Sands wasn't going to let it change.

They rented cars for the various research trips. Sometimes it meant a couple of days just driving through huge tracts of baking Mexican wasteland, but Sands had no intention of laying an airline trail linking their current identities to each of the people they were checking on, and he wasn't willing to stand out from the crowd in Lorenzo's choice of Bling-mobile either. El assured him the truck wasn't actually so thick on the chrome, but Sands expected him to say that whatever.

He left a layer of insulation between himself and the targets for his opening inquiries, approaching people at one extra remove from normal practice until he could be sure he had the right name to cherry-pick with the irresistible offer. The personality types on Sands' list weren't too compatible with quiet rural past-times, and his inquiries were greased by the mass of large cities where a tourist could pass unremarked, just as long as that tourist wasn't too obviously blind. Sands got to stretch and amuse himself a little through the elegant and energising play of carefully-orchestrated scenes with El, much more tailored to his preferences than the stifling boredom of the days between, the wait back in Acapulco for the lines to twitch into place before the next target could be set. They kept their patterns unpredictable, holing up each night away in a different anonymous, low-middle rate hotel.

Sex was back on the daily agenda, the precedent of that first night running right on down the hallway. It was usually more El's idea, the hands and lips on Sands' skin between bland hotel sheets or in the insect-tinged quiet of their room at the kid's place, and Sands was perfectly happy to leave him to take charge. El got his fix of the slower, softer sex he sometimes craved, and Sands got the scampering thoughts screwed from his head, the claws scratching their tunnels and passageways through his brain silenced by the sensations of his body and the drift into sleep.

If she was good for nothing else, this vicious, camel-cud-chewing bitch of a country was at least useful for getting him laid. There really was nothing like the over-arching threat of sudden, murderous assault with automatic weapons to add a little cardamom and freshen up a relationship.

The kid had obviously called Fideo right in the liquid department. Each time they rolled back into Acapulco, the dipso was spending more time conscious and sipping from the bottle in his hand, and less in an inebriated coma. Sands would have appreciated the chance to do a little more fishing if he could have gotten the guy alone, but the brat stayed practically glued to him, and was only too happy to drag any conversation into an irrelevant argument.

With no research needed to keep him working alongside Sands now, El wasted a lot of his time immersed in banal indulgences with the sidekicks. He dropped into the habit of lingering at the table after dinner, the three of them swapping teasing insults and endless chatter. Sometimes they'd break out the guitars instead, which was almost bearable, given the alternative.

Sands passed those evenings in their room, checking news channels for any hint of a comment that might mean movement, or reaction. That never ate through more than an hour of his time, and he'd leave the earphone in to listen to a book or his music, the rhythm of the words or the beat in his head still leaving him with El's smiling voice and the rise of his laughter in the noise from below.

He lay still, unreacting, when El's boots tapped on the stairs late in the night, ignored the soft click of the door and the dip of the mattress, kept his breathing light and even beneath the hand that slid onto his ribs. He didn't try to convince himself it was enough to fool El, too many details impossible to fake, but there was nothing like holding back a little of what a man wanted to make him want it more.

El didn't call him on the bullshit. He flexed his body around Sands, shaping lengths of muscle and angles along him, breathing tequila and smoke heavy through his hair while Sands dropped into true sleep.

Not all their trips out of town ran entirely smoothly; some minor glitches were inevitable. Predictions were only as reliable as the information they were based on, and not everyone was as discerning as Sands in squeezing the truth from the gossip. Working at one extra remove from the target had its drawbacks in the quality of the available sources, and the occasional over-adventurous idiot.

When the plans first wavered a little off course, Sands made a point of being out of the car and into the house while El was still locking up the garage. He followed the raised voices and forced, soundtracked laughter to the TV room, waited inside the doorway for the prickle and the half-breath that told him he had an audience. "There's a little something extra in the car you'll want to get rid of after dark." Sands spoke towards his fingernails, held as if inspecting them; much less likely to embarrass than talking at where he thought a person _might_ be. "I'm assuming you know the best sites for local disposal, I'm afraid I haven't had the chance to get fully acquainted with the neighbourhood."

Lorenzo's voice came from low, stretched-across-the-sofa level. "You better be jerking my chain, or I'm gonna get seriously pissed."

Sands lifted his head briefly his way and shrugged. "One of the people I was chatting with got ideas about following us home. It seemed best that she didn't."

Swift rustle of movement and shifting weight, Lorenzo up on his feet and talking at Sands' level. "You parked a car with a fucking body in it in my garage, in my house."

Sands stretched his lips outwards, curled into a thin smile. "Technically El did, since I don't park anywhere these days, and I wasn't going to phrase it quite that way just in case someone might be listening, but it's more my body than his, yes."

"You're completely fucking sick, you know that."

Sands raised his eyebrows a little, his expression mild. "You're acting like I wanted to kill her. Really, that kind of thing's too inconvenient to wantonly indulge in. If the people I talk to start disappearing, business can get very slow."

"The CIA must be fucked in the goddamn head." Lorenzo's tone hadn't altered, no appreciation of the logic. "I can't believe even those bastards would let _you_ run off the leash."

The kid's reaction was nothing unexpected. He was a killer himself, and a natural at it, but he killed with the fuel of hatred, the adrenaline of the fight. He would never appreciate the purely practical approach, the 'Well, I suppose I'll have to shoot you now,' four quick, grouped rounds, and walk away. To someone like Lorenzo, the tidy, sensible simplicities of Sands' existence were a mark of 'other', and Sands had become well versed in the responses to 'other' before he'd learned to wear normal.

Sands only smiled in Lorenzo's direction, polite, but not suspiciously friendly. "Oh, I can be very convincing when I want to be," he said, letting the inflections fall even and natural.

He wasn't naïve enough to believe his normal act had completely slid past those probing bastards in psych, but he'd never needed it to. A basic level of ruthlessness, of disconnection, was practically part of the job description for a certain kind of field agent, the ability to follow an order without stopping to quibble too much over the ethical and moral implications. What psych picked up on between the smiles and the chit-chat was enough to make sure he'd always been given the more delicately interesting assignments he preferred. And if he exceeded the actual job requirements by a certain amount, well, psych might wonder, but that kind of thing was a lot harder to prove.

El's feet sounded steady and regular from the hallway, heading closer – he might not have caught the specifics at that range, but he couldn't have missed the kid's tone bouncing off of the stonework. "I brought him here to do this," El said, stopped just inside the door. "I know how he works. I'm responsible for anything he does."

Sands turned the stare of the lenses flat onto El, stretched his voice into a slow drawl. "That's real sweet of you, El, but nobody's responsible for me except, well, me."

"I didn't mean it that way," El said, the same neutral voice.

"No? You don't get to mollify Little Lori with what he wants to hear and then feed me a different angle, at least not when we're both in the same room."

El took the two strides between them, speaking close. "You're doing what I asked of you. What we all asked of you," he said, flicking his head the kid's way. Rub of cloth over cloth and a low pressure of fingers along Sands' arm. "If it doesn't always go smoothly, should we put all the blame on you?"

El always kept business locked within its bounds well enough, but outside of that particular game park, Sands had been aware for a long time now of the brush light across his sleeve, the touch of fabric he wasn't wearing at his wrist.

With El, it was an impossible call whether those fleeting gestures were deliberate, or if the guy had no clue about the hangovers from his earlier touchy-feely life. Sands' suspicions curved towards the unconscious view, which made it mostly pointless to go to all the trouble of avoiding them.

He tucked his elbow tighter to his body, took a deliberate step back and away. "Since you put it that way," he said with a quick smile in Lorenzo's direction. "If you feel the need to offer yourselves up as the sacrificial scapegoats, I'm always willing to pick one out. Now if you'll excuse me, I think I might need to go scrub my fingernails. They feel a little sticky."

The air flowed cool and empty around Sands as he walked from the room, through the house, its weight feathering his hair across his cheekbones, pressing cotton to his skin with phantom fingers in place of real ones.

Sands had never had any interest in the touchy-feelies outside of sex, though there were times they provided a useful tool for a specific effect. Now, though - touching El was communication and connection, a depth of information about the world he couldn't reach with just his ears.

His years of anthropological study of the people around him had never sidelined into the lifestyles of the blind, how much touch was normal and what could be considered pathetically insecure clutching and groping.

Sands wasn't shooting for looking normal for a blind man, only for being normal for Sands.

When the after-dinner chat kicked off that evening, Sands took his usual opt-out, and the tap of boots on the stairs followed a minute later, solid and regular.

El shut the door behind him, leaning back against it in a soft rustle of cloth. "If it matters, most likely they already know."

Sands tipped his face up from the laptop, keeping track of the bleeps as it ran through its start-up checks. "They've got a working set of ears, and you tell me they're not entirely stupid, so I imagine they do." He raised his eyebrows to arch high over the line of the lenses. "I'm more surprised Little Lori hasn't bothered to mention it, one more charge on his long list of all the ways I'm corrupting you."

"He worries because his friend chooses to live with a man who has no morals, no guilt - no compassion," El finished, soft. "Whether or not we also have sex doesn't matter so much."

"Not even to a good Catholic boy?" Sands prompted.

El laughed, short and harsh, the dulled tap of his head falling back to the wood beneath it. "Your 'good Catholic boy' is a killer, as I am, and just as good a Catholic."

"I've found that people tend to pick and choose among their religious edicts," Sands said, letting his amusement bleed through the words. "You'd be surprised just how many killers claim to be devout to God's ways."

El shrugged, the familiar sound emphasised by the rub of fabric along the door. "Few people know more about how meaningless sex can be than Lorenzo."

"Oh, I wouldn't say it's meaningless." Sands smiled, wide and lazy. "It isn't necessary, but it serves a useful purpose, if only as temporary entertainment. Would you call your guitar meaningless?"

El moved from the door, his fingers closing on Sands' elbow to pull him round in the chair, El's legs pressed to his knees, his lips meeting Sands' fast and harsh. "I didn't say it was that way for me," he said as he stepped to the side. He didn't let go of Sands' arm, and Sands didn't shake him off. "You don't care if they know."

Sands laughed. "I don't care if they think I'm fucking next door's poodle. Hell, Lorenzo would probably believe it, maybe I should drop him some hints over breakfast."

"Better say it's a spaniel, you'll be more convincing," El smiled.

El didn't ask any more about Sands' avoidance behaviour. He'd know Sands wouldn't tell him if he couldn't work it out.

Sands was aware when El slipped from the bed later, dressing swift and simple without the click of the light. He tracked the footfalls to the door and beyond it, dulled, the quiet exchange of voices and the soft rumble of a car driven slow beneath the rhythmic patter of rain.

Sands said nothing when he returned either, only let El's cool skin wrap around him.

Sands had to kill a couple more of his informants who asked too many of the wrong kind of questions, and then get a check on their info before he moved on it. He'd never considered himself the kind of person who repeated his mistakes, and Mexico had taught him more than well enough the Microsoft shares value of getting his own double-cross in first.

El disagreed with at least one of Sands' risk assessments, but he helped dispose of the body just the same. Sands had always found it easier to appeal to the baser instincts when he worked, and even El's moral superiority had to admit that the kind of person who would sell out another for money or personal gain was no particular loss to society.

After three weeks of listening and following and delicately phrased negotiations, Sands had his name.


	4. Chapter 4

"How can you know?" was the kid's first, and entirely predictable, response.

"He fits the profile." Sands said easily. "He's ambitious and greedy, with quite a creative vicious streak if anybody happens to step on his toes. He's got big plans unfolding to expand his legitimate interests with no suggestion of where the money's coming from."

"That fits pretty much all of those bastards," Lorenzo bitched. "So why pick this one?"

Sands smiled at him, bright and confident. "He's also been making a lot of calls to every name on that list of yours, plus a few extras I've tied into Honaker's 'businesses.'"

"You hacked his phone records?" The kid actually sounded impressed for once, which proved just how stupid he really was.

"I paid off the guy who shreds his papers. He cost a lot less than a good hacker."

Shifting movement from the chair on the right – this little chat had been deliberately timed around Fideo having one of his less tequila-soaked sessions. "You say if we kill this man, the others will be frightened and give up?"

"Well, nobody's casting any microalloyed steel round it, but there's a good chance it'll play that way, yes."

"Then we kill him," Fideo said, the agreement instant and almost too easy.

"And just how do you plan on doing it?" Sands still had some curiosity prickling through his head when it came to the dipso – when he wasn't so drunk to be a complete waste of respiration, there were occasional flashes of insight to his remarks that suggested there might be an interesting, practical intellect drowning under the pickle juice.

"Shoot him, what else?" That was Lorenzo opting for his usual up-front solution to any problem.

Sands tipped his head towards him with a hint of smile. "Details?"

"Who cares? Three of us are enough to put a rotating tail on him, whoever gets the chance takes the shot."

"No. It needs to be a done a certain way," El said, the careful words that shaped his thoughts. It was the first contribution he'd bothered to make, leaving Sands to do the talking, even though Lorenzo would take it easier from El. "It has to be dramatic – a message. It has to be obvious to everyone who did it, and why."

"Obvious to everyone but the local branches of law enforcement," Sands added, "since I don't suppose the two of you are keen on adopting El's lifestyle." He swung his head slow around the full range of his audience. "El Mariachi's going to jump out of retirement again and remind people just how unhealthy it can be to ask the wrong kind of questions." He turned to El with slightly raised eyebrows and a twist to the edge of his lips. "Looks like that shotgun's going to earn its keep. I hope you packed the outfit."

"I brought it," El said, flat and clipped.

"So we're going on a trip to Morelia." Sands smiled wide over the room. "Ayala prefers his inland house during hurricane season. I think you'll like it."

"I'll start packing our shit," Lorenzo said. "How long are we gone for?"

"It's just me and El at first." Sands snipped the kid's thoughts back fast. "We still want you two here looking wholesome and boring for the informants. Once we've checked out the choices and come up with some possible plans, we bring you in for the fine-tuning and the, how should I say it, execution."

One of those quick, charged silences as the mariachis confirmed agreement with each other, before El rose to his feet. "Then it's time for me to fill my guitar case," he said. "Lorenzo, what do you have?"

"All the good toys." The kid bounced up from the sofa with that insta-grin. "Come on, I'll show ya."

"If there are any flash-bangs, make sure to being a few along," Sands said as they passed him. "Might be useful to add to the show."

El's feet paused by the door. "Any more special orders?"

Sands tipped his head as if thinking and then smiled. "I think that should do it."

He waited till the paired steps were well down the hallway before he turned back to the chair, where a high, steady grate of unscrewing already followed the end of the chat. "You'll play along with it, just like that? You're not going to question me on the details, the information?"

Liquid sloshed before he got an answer. "El knows the reasons, he's not against it."

"And that's enough for you? El believes me, so you do too? You know nothing about me."

"I know more than I might want to." The words were a statement, no sharp indent of teeth behind the tone. "El knows what he's doing. It would be strange to start doubting him now."

"You'll actually trust him that far, base all your choices and risk your life on his judgement." Sands' contempt spiked through his words, but Fideo only took another drink, then answered with the same calm.

"Don't you?"

Sands didn't have to consider the truth of it; that was a decision he'd made long ago. He much preferred to have the details, the reasoning, the chance to check for flaws in El's thinking, but when the bullets and noise and the cordite stink enclosed them, he simply _did._ "Only in his specific area of expertise," he said, with a quick smile. "I certainly don't trust you just because he does."

Sweeping rustle of cloth from the chair, and Sands got the distinct feeling he'd been saluted with a bottle. "I'll keep it in mind."

Too many of his conversations with the dipso went that way – Fideo always refused to rise, and how much of that was the man and how much the doping drag of the booze, Sands hadn't entirely figured out.

Not that it was going to matter, because a few more days with the sidekicks was all it would take to finish this deal.

It still irritated him not to know. But not enough to make him want to stick around.

They took the drive to Morelia the next day. Sands booked them a vacation rental place, two bedrooms for when the hangers-on joined the game. It was less hassle than to keep switching hotels for the next few weeks, and more anonymous and private, no minimum wage staff watching their every move, ripe to be paid off.

They already knew the addresses of Ayala's house and the local offices of his legitimate business fronts, and El scoped those from a respectful distance, getting a feel for layout and style and people. They tracked the man where they could be discreet, through the crowds, while Sands arranged for the architectural plans to the main buildings. Ayala seemed to keep a reasonable degree of routine to his days, touring his offices during the usual business hours, with other, more interesting engagements sometimes taking up part of his evenings.

He never went anywhere alone; he always had a driver for his car, and an 'aide' alongside him, who scanned the surroundings and didn't look at too many papers. They tailed him to a number of restaurants, three of them quickly becoming obvious as his favourites. They ate lunch at those places on other days, checking layouts and exits and lighting and the routines of the staff. Not the flashiest of the city's joints, but the man had excellent taste in food – Sands had always preferred running surveillance on people who were a little more discerning.

Between the watching, and Sands' meetings with a few delicately selected people, they spent hours at the apartment dissecting the information, picking through the details, the options and the obstacles. This was El at his most Elemental – the man walked through a door and saw the room drawn as a series of exits, elevations and sight lines. He unrolled a building plan and shaped it into cover and pitfalls, a complex maze of climbs and leaps routed through. Sands sprawled across the bed, relaxed without jacket or shoes, lighting their cigarettes as he built his own mental maps from the flow of words; he fired off comments and criticism, and the replies were fast and sure, any trip the failure of speech to keep up with a mind that flashed with instinct and years of experience.

He'd missed this. Missed the strategising, the chaos and improvisation of the full-scale assault, missed the challenge of testing El at what the man did best. As a full-time occupation, it grew tedious and unpleasant, but as a sideline hobby it was distinctly entertaining.

There was still the fundamental, irritating drawback of their geographic location, but Sands was more relaxed than at any point since they'd boarded a plane to goddamn Mexico.

He might have enjoyed it more if somebody in a nearby apartment hadn't been keeping a big hairy mutt that barked half the night. Who the fuck rented out vacation lots to people with animals anyway?

El would wake up with the first deep blast resonating through the walls, then be asleep again by round four. Unless Sands metaphorically prodded at him, because insomnia was a little less onerous when it was shared, and he'd take the opportunity to do some extra tunnelling into the sidekicks by the indirect route.

"So just how far can we rely on these friends of yours?" he asked through the ringing silence after one canine outburst. "And yes, I do already know your first answer to that, I'm talking on a purely practical level." Better to kick these things off on a motive that couldn't be questioned, then lead the conversation 'naturally' to more interesting territory.

"Fideo's still a good shot, even with his problems." El wriggled round in the bed, turning back to face Sands after he'd rolled away in sleep. "Sometimes when the fighting's hard, he can be a little... rash."

Sands arched his eyebrows – the drapes weren't thick, and the light leaking from the street would be enough to see by. "If you call him rash, that translates to suicidal in any reasonable language."

"No, but we might want to keep him from coming up against large numbers at once," El conceded. "He can make choices based more on his emotions than on good tactical grounds."

So there _was_ a man who'd react buried there under the booze – interesting to have that suspicion confirmed, more interesting to dig out some of those triggers the next time they met. "How about the kid? What's his weakness we need to work around?"

El didn't answer right away, and when he did, his words were shaped and heavy with thought. "As a fighter, I'm not sure he has one. He's fast, precise, methodical – he sees his chances and he takes them." His voice flashed into a quick smile. "He's been shot less often than me." Short pause among the rustle and ripple of sheets. "His true weakness would be that whatever risky things I do, or Fideo does, he follows us in, no questions, no hesitation."

"So whichever plan we run with, we should keep him separate," Sands offered, a little bait for more. "Let him fight his own style without interference."

El shook his head, hair rubbing heavy over the pillow. "He won't go without Fideo. He lost that battle with me long ago, but he won't leave Fideo to fight alone."

Sands twisted to lie on his side, facing El, closer, pulling the bedclothes tighter over his skin. "You know, El," he said slowly, "you sound like you've gone to a lot of trouble to get rid of a guy who should be exactly what you want at your back."

No catch to the slow slide of breath, no twitch through the sheets. "I don't want to drag him into all my problems. He has a life of his own, a home."

"My stab at the donkey tail says Lorenzo had racked up quite a body count by an age when you'd shot nothing more than a few desert lizards." El didn't answer, which was more than Sands needed. He smiled, slow. "If you're looking for someone to save, you'd have better luck starting with Fideo."

"Not save," El said instantly. "I can't save him from what he wants. But there are mistakes he hasn't made yet."

"Mistakes like getting a bit too famous, maybe? You're really not helping him out with that one."

"That's why I had to come back to fix it."

Sands' lip twitched upwards at one corner. "Whether you wanted to or not?"

"My life hasn't been about what I want for a long time now." Still no reaction under El's tone, just the heavy, clinging drag of resignation.

"You really should look into changing that, El," Sands said, lifting his voice light and breezy. "Too many obligations aren't so good for the soul." Especially when those obligations sucked Sands in with him.

"I'll try." The smile was back with the words, and El rolled closer, fingers curling over Sands' ribs. "So if something I want is close by, I should just reach out and take it?"

Sands let himself relax under the hand, every joint and muscle loose, pliable. "It's never too soon to start building those good habits." It might have been interesting to tease the conversation along a little further, but sex was good too; better when El was reinforcing Sands as what he wanted.

And maybe when he'd come, he'd be able to sleep through that goddamn dog.

Sex and schemes, packaged with good food and cigarettes - it was ten days of pleasant, entirely cooperative accord, and it didn't survive an hour past the arrival of the sidekicks, the transition from theoretical discussion to an actual, detailed plan.

"It needs to be the house," El said.

"No, it doesn't. We know the layout, but we've got nothing on the security." Except that it was there, and a lot of it. There was only so much detail Sands could put his hands on when he couldn't get within sight of the subject or anyone close to him. "One of those restaurants of his would be less problematic."

"Nowhere public. Bystanders mix badly with guns."

"Coming from you, El, that should almost be funny," Sands drawled.

"I never chose it that way," El said simply. "It was chosen for me."

"So we set off the fire alarm and everybody gets the hell out," Lorenzo said.

"Including our target," Sands pointed out.

"Yeah, but he's jumpy, suspicious - he won't take the front door with the masses."

"Neither will all of the masses, they'll take the nearest door," Fideo said. "Where one person goes, more will follow."

"And then our target's somewhere in the middle of a panicking crowd on the street." El said, wrapping up the scenario rather accurately. "I don't see how that helps."

"Well, if they're not trapped in a small space, the incidentals can get out of the way faster when the shooting starts," Sands said, aiming him a quick, closed-lipped smile.

"Yeah, everybody but grandma," Lorenzo snapped. "But I guess you don't give a shit about her."

Sands turned his head the brat's way with a half-raised eyebrow. "I'd hoped you might just be good enough to miss her and shoot the actual target instead. I know El is."

"None of that matters, because we're not doing it." El's voice was gaining a bit of crackle around the edges. "So we're back to the house."

"Which I veto. Unless of course you all want to die."

"You wanna come up with a plan some time instead of just knocking everybody else's?"

"The three of you know the details of how you work together, I don't." Sands kept his tone perfectly mild and reasonable, finely tuned to annoy the ill-tempered. "Anything I suggest will obviously have flaws."

"So you're gonna admit you're not perfect now? Never thought I'd get to hear that one."

"We're supposed to be thinking of a plan," El cut in, knife-blade voice that was pure, precise threat, "and you two are making thinking difficult."

"I'm just telling it how it is," Sands said easily, stretching his legs out to cross at the ankles and slouching deeper into the sofa.

Flicker of sound from the kid's direction, then stilled, and Sands smiled faintly. He had the option of oblivious immunity to those kind of El looks, but Little Lori had to oblige or really piss him off.

A soft, rhythmic grating fired up from his left as Fideo unscrewed a bottle cap. Or was it re-screwing now? Sands was losing track.

"Why's it need to be a building?" Lorenzo offered into the silence. "We can take him out between stops, ambush the car."

"That's not a plan, that's improvisation," Sands said. "The first mistake, he heads off in a cloud of stinking rubber, and we won't get another chance. He'll hole up where we can't get near him, and bring the wrath of Ayala down on the both of you from afar." He turned full on to the kid and smiled brightly. "On second thoughts, I like that one, let's roll with it."

"We could do it when he's already stopped," Fideo said. "Somewhere we know he goes. Outside one of those offices."

El shook his head. "The window's too small. The car stops right outside, then he's in the door. Less than five seconds on the street."

"And if he makes it inside, we're back in Scenario Sidekick Slaughter."

"So we need him on the sidewalk away from places he owns, somewhere without too many people." Fideo's words were slow, but considering now instead of drunk. "You say there's a coffee stop he makes in the mornings?"

"Lobby of the Alameda early, before he hits the offices," Sands filled in. "The corrupting mark of too many foreign business trips, a weakness for lattes."

"The car waits on the street. He goes inside with the bodyguard, but they have to cross the forecourt to the door." El's voice was rising a little, quickening, definitely interested. "That takes it to around twelve seconds."

"Car running or off?" Lorenzo asked.

"Running. It's supposed to be a no parking zone."

"Still not enough. We'd need to hit him fast out of the car, so he can't make a sprint for the hotel, but if he's too close he could dive back in the car."

"We box it in," El said. "Then the car won't help him."

Sands uncrossed his ankles, let his fingers tap over his thigh. "We'll need one car in place outside, early – two showing up at once will trip his paranoia, he'll be gone before he's trapped."

"It won't work - his driver never pulls up close to another car."

"So there's somebody in the first car to back up once number two's in place behind," Lorenzo said. "And they can roll it round the block if anybody bitches about the parking."

"It might be easier just to ram the fucker, we're assuming the driver sidelines as a bodyguard on top of the obvious gun." Sands threw a quick smile out around the room. "We don't need to worry about tipping Ayala off, he's going to know by then anyway."

"Hell, if the driver's one of the bad guys, we can just shoot him through the windshield. It takes time to push a corpse out of the driver's seat and kick out the glass."

Sometimes the kid's direct approach actually came in useful. "Fine with me, but we still box him to be sure, and add that extra dramatic flair. So that's Lorenzo and Fideo in the two cars – we put Fideo in the sitting spot, that way it doesn't matter if he's drunk."

"Hey, if I can shoot, I can drive," Fideo protested.

"Any cop who pulls you over on a DUI won't be impressed by the logic," Sands said, dropping into his slow drawl for the mentally deficient. "It's really not worth fucking over the entire plan because you need to prove yourself."

"I never said I should, only that I could." Fideo didn't sound truly offended, but there was something a little spikier than usual in the words – maybe it really was the booze that doped him into indifference most of the time.

Maybe that was the point.

Sands dropped his head back to rest on the top of the sofa. "One of you takes out the driver, the other can have the bodyguard." He twisted and smiled brightly sideways at El. "El, of course, will be waiting out on the street to make the main shot, since publicity's part of the deal with this one."

"And what about you?" Lorenzo asked.

Sands sprawled unmoving, not bothering to turn his way. "What about me?"

"That's all of us mapped out, so where are you?" Less of a question this time, more of a demand.

Sands steepled his hands together over his lap, fingers tapping loosely at his knuckles. "It needs to be quick, noisy, and in particular it needs to be messy - just what the three of you specialise in. I think I'll sit this one out."

A short rustle-shift from El alongside him, and he could feel the look that went with it.

"Lori here mentioned they've got the photos to go with my name, if you recall. It really wouldn't be wise for me to try and blend in before an ambush."

He still had all El's attention on him, that momentary absence of movement as El studied, considered, but he didn't question it. At least not yet – that might change when they were alone.

Backing El through a fight, tracking El, that was easy, running in Sands' head on a level that was almost instinct. Keeping tabs on both the sidekicks too, on those less familiar feet and movements and unfamiliar fighting styles through a gun-battle of quick take-downs and passing pedestrians - he didn't know if he could do it. Didn't know if he could hold back on the 'shoot-anything-but-El' that was more reaction than thought, not when his ears were blasted by gunfire and impacts, cordite and blood burning into his nose with every breath.

And if he could, if he stopped to double-check exactly who he was about to shoot, well, that was just too likely to end up with dead Sands.

"So while you're keeping your own face conveniently out of the frame, how about El? You're putting him right out on stage under the spotlight." It was the kid who broke the silence again, provided the distraction. Sands might have appreciated it more if it hadn't been the kid who'd hauled the issue to the fore in the first place.

"Nobody will see El. Nobody ever sees El, they only see the suit – it's like Superman." He flashed a wide smile across his shoulder to the Mariachi. "Of course the guns help as a bit of a distraction there too."

"I don't know how it works, but something does," El said, the humour creeping back through his voice. "I've seen some of those pictures the police make from witnesses, and they don't look like me."

Fideo shifted in his chair, creaking wood and rustling cloth from Sands' left. "Even with three of us, it won't be easy," he said. "It's two cars to get in place, one of them after our guy's out on the street, but before he gets close to the lobby. The timing's going to be tight."

Christ, they really had to be slacking if they were relying on the drunk to drag the conversation back on track now. "I've got short range comm sets laid on. Lorenzo in the tail car can fill you in when he's close, so you and El don't need to wait on alert the whole time." Sands ran the stare of his lenses over the arc of room."It's the best chance we're going to get. Unless anyone has another suggestion they've been nesting down with all this time?"

Nobody was confessing, only what he expected after the first few appalling suggestions, so he fixed his attention on the kid. "Did you get hold of those flash-bangs?"

"Not the trademarked type, but Fideo's rigged up something close."

"How lovely, especially since I won't be the one handling them." Sands aimed a wry smile into the corner, but this time the dipso ignored the edge slicing his way. "Toss a couple onto the sidewalk before you leave. It adds to the newsworthiness, and it covers your exit while everybody watches the show." He twisted back El's way to pre-empt the protest. "There won't be anyone on the street by then, they'll all have found something solid to hide behind."

"There won't be so many to begin with," El said, "unless we get unlucky and meet an airport coach arriving." And then El was speaking directly to Sands, words lowered and air brushing warm at his cheek. "If that happens, I'm calling it off and we wait a day."

Sands shrugged, his voice entirely neutral. "I don't see how a day will matter. Your hit, your choice."

"Well, I'm all for getting this bastard turned over sooner instead of later," Lorenzo said, twitching and vivid with that vicious snap escaping him once again. "Then I can get back home and start having some fun, my sex life's been for shit since these fuckers started giving us the eye."

It was tough to call if that last part was a crack at anyone else's choice of sex life without knowing if a look flashed alongside it, but if it was, El wasn't reacting.

"We should stick around a couple more days after the hit. They'll expect the guilty ones to run, and I've got a few people who'll fill me in on any activity in unanticipated directions. We can keep a check on what the police are putting together too." He showed the kid a faint smile under raised eyebrows. "I take it you do want to be certain you're free and clear before we end this."

El wouldn't leave Mexico before he was sure, whatever Sands' take on it.

"Two days, sure, what the hell. Who cares so long as it works?"

"It will work," El said quiet, confident. "It has to."

It didn't take a day to set it up. Trashed out autos for cash sale with no paperwork were easy enough to come by in Mexico, and the other equipment was all pre-order. They ran some tests with the comms for range and interference – not great on the range, but they worked inside the cars, and more importantly they were compact and unobtrusive, no more stand-out than somebody wearing an iPod. The mariachis talked some more over details, timing, and El's position for the wait, until Sands felt it was as fine-tuned as they were going to get it. If this turned into a total fuck up, it would be down to the sidekicks broiling their own asses.

When El left the bed to dress the next morning, it was the faint waxy scent of burning and the low, irregular chinks that plucked Sands from half-doze to full wakefulness. He lay sprawled, the warmth of the bedclothes folded around him, El's movements round the room enhanced by the metallic notes behind each step that had been missing for more than a year.

It was familiar in an oddly distanced way – the fundamental El as Sands had originally burned him into his brain, movements and suggestions and aural cues superimposed on that one visual image he was left with. The El woven through memories of adrenaline and exhaustion, bullets and the stink of blood and the constant, endless running; of that early, burrowing terror, clawing down through his soul to depths far more destructive than the pain.

But it was also the El of fervent, reaching sex, and bitter-dark humour as they fled, alive, and it was El, whatever sounds he wrapped himself in on a particular day; the memories stayed neatly detached, vivid in Sands' head, but his pulse slow and sleep-steady under sheet-warmed skin.

It was an interesting form of aural discontinuity.

At least until the repetitive chorus of barks echoed through the walls again.

Sands sat up, swiping stray strands of hair back from his face with his hand. "One day I'm gonna shoot that fucking dog. And whoever owns it for keeping the goddamn thing around."

"Dogs aren't so bad." Steady swish with jangles, and no stress to tell in El's voice as he shrugged into the jacket. "I had a dog once."

Sands tipped his head, curious. It was surprising when new facts and thoughts slipped out of El now, little corners and angles of him still to find that Sands hadn't already explored. "I wouldn't have tagged you as the dog type."

"Neither would I, before I had one." El was smiling, but there was the hollow note beneath it Sands hadn't heard in a while. "He wasn't really mine, he was Domino's. She was the reason I made myself into this." Soft rustle and clink from the Mariachi clothes. "She died because of me, and left me with a dog and a motorbike."

Sands flexed his legs beneath the sheets, leaning forwards to rest his elbows over his knees. "That doesn't sound like a terribly practical combination."

"No, the dog rode the bike just fine." El's humour flashed warm, and gone. "For a while anyway. He didn't live so much longer than Domino."

"But you didn't like the dog enough to get another."

The bed dipped and shivered beneath Sands as El sat at its edge, slow, rubbing slide of a boot drawn over fabric. "I missed him when he was gone. He saved my life twice before he died, but that seemed a poor reason to replace him and lose that one too."

Banging, fast and heavy at the door, twitching ripple through the mattress as El jerked upright. "Hey, El, get your lazy ass outta bed, we're on a schedule here."

Another slide and a heavier, more definitive chink from the spur, El pulling on the second boot. "Let me hear Fideo out there with you, then I'll hurry," he called, loud, smiling.

"Yeah, yeah, he says the same shit about you." The kid's eyes rolled in his voice, hollowed by the door between.

El jingled once, low with the shift of weight; Sands felt the slow exhale of breath, the swish of hair alongside his cheek; the momentary touch of forehead and nose against his own, before El turned away towards the door.

"Have fun," Sands called after him.

"I hope not," El said, his tone entirely dark.

Sands didn't doubt it, but it would happen anyway. Once El got a target in sight and the hunt mode kicked in, the adrenaline would hook him and burn him through every bone.

El got off on the challenge, the risk, on pitting his skill against someone else's when it was winner takes all. There was a distinction between liking the fight and liking the kill, but it was a line El's conscience didn't see too well afterwards, when he remembered just how good it felt to bring a gun around and pull the trigger.

He should just admit he was a junkie and learn to like it.

Sands wriggled down again beneath the warm touch of the sheets, thumping at his pillow to beat it back into shape. It was only a little before seven, barely sunrise as far as Sands kept track of these things. While it wasn't exactly relevant to him now, the psychological impact of knowing it was dawn stuck around.

El wouldn't eat right before a planned hit, and Sands guessed the other mariachis would be the same. Food sat in the stomach like lead, a slow, sick feeling as adrenaline sucked all the blood from the gut and pumped it into muscle instead. Sands lay, tracking the soft sounds of feet and half-heard words from the rest of the apartment, ending with the slam of a door and the fading note of an engine.

There was still sound, still the low background hum of voices and traffic around the apartment complex, distant and rhythmic and real. He figured he'd have gotten past the part where silence gave him the creeping heebies by now, grating over him with metallic teeth that humped his whole skin into prickles of tension, but sticking around the cities where the fun was meant he never actually had to test it out.

It was early, and it was comfortable, the air brushing the tail of the night's cool across his cheek, the sheets folding their warmth to his body, and he was just too fucking awake to get back to sleep.

He tossed off the bedding and dropped to the floor, running through his morning set of push-ups, sit-ups and stretches. It was always easier to get that goddamn shit out of the way early.

He threw a load of washing in the laundry, because they'd be moving on again in a couple of days and the dirty stuff was annoying to pack. He hoped he'd hit the settings he wanted, and wasn't going to shrink or dye everything – it was one of those dick-biting ever-rotating dials, where following the instructions El had given him worked just fine, so long as it had been left in the right place. But he sure as fuck wasn't gonna wait around and ask every time, and with his colour choices now, the worst he could get was his T-shirts grey-washed.

He showered, shrugged into a robe, and made breakfast, one ear following the patchy, static-broken chatter of the radio set-up, tuned into the police band. He sipped at too-hot coffee while his granola softened to the perfect consistency in the milk. He used to eat a real breakfast, back when he used to take real exercise, but he lived by an image; an image that cracked dangerously if he got visibly sloppy, and his image didn't have a bulge oozing over the belt.

He chewed on dull, tasteless food, while the machine spun up from a swish to a rumble through the wall, and voices came and went outside, distant, obvious, unthreatening.

He ran his spoon around the bowl, light and grating over the ceramic, and met nothing.

Everything should be in place by now; the crush cars collected, El and Fideo outside the Alameda, Lorenzo set a few blocks back to tail Ayala in.

He took out the laundry, wet and clinging round his hands, dumped it in the tumble drier and set it going. He cleared up his breakfast pots and emptied out the coffee maker.

The radio buzzed and crackled between routine messages of burglaries and muggings and pitiful, undisciplined assault.

He ran through the regular news reports on the laptop, the daily check on where they were, where they would be, and back in Bolivia. The polls were getting closer, Morales and Quiroga hovering around a tie, but the momentum was all behind Morales. By now, Lomas would have sniffed out the change in the wind, and he'd be sitting back tidy to wait it out.

Ah, well, he'd been fun to play with for a while, but there'd be others.

Sands set another batch of coffee steeping in the machine.

Maybe there'd been a hitch; El could've called it off, like he threatened.

He could call El's cell, find out for sure just what the fuck was going on.

Course, if he called at the wrong time, he could precipitate a fucking disaster. Then he'd be stuck in this charming vacation goat-hole for even longer, with the kid accusing him of sabotage as an added delight.

He brought the ashtray through from the bedroom and lit a cigarette, pulling the smoke in deep, holding it back in delayed breaths, feeling the heat of it slide past his lips, over his tongue.

The coffee-maker beeped across the room, sharp and intrusive and welcome against the background buzz of the drier, and he poured to meet his fingertip at the cup's edge, sucking off the bitter drops that clung. Fridge for cream, cupboard for sugar, the routine ingrained, mindless. He took his coffee over to the table by the radio, stirring in sugar, stirring, stirring, the rhythmic slide and ring of metal on porcelain loud in every sweeping circuit.

And then it was there, sliced through the fluctuating hiss of interference into his head – the call to the Alameda, to an incident involving gunshots.

So El had found his window for the show.

Sands left the spoon resting in his coffee and reached to turn up the volume, dragging hard on his smoke. Call acknowledged, location confirmed, multiple cars swinging around to head on over. Ambulances were on the way too, which was promising, though if the hit had gone right, nobody would be needing one.

He listened to the short bursts of reports for a few more minutes, confirming an auto accident right alongside the gunfire and victims down, everything in line with the pre-plan, then re-tuned to Radio 13, the news and sports band. The reception was easier on the ears, and he'd get the real info that way, once the reporters showed up with their enthusiastic eyewitness accounts, giving much more of the gory detail than all that terse, practical cop talk.

The first of the press were in place just minutes after the police, the signal vultures for the rest of the pack still descending. Morelia was hardly one of Mexico's 'active' cities, well away from the borders where all the more interesting events went down, so a shooting was a windfall that provided real juice for the week's blender. Something for a news guy to get a good bite into after all that hurricane bullshit that had been clogging the airwaves, a backed up drain of human interest refuse.

The reporters were almost amusing, their excitement trickling through the grave, serious tones required by protocol. Three people confirmed down at the scene, and with no gushing over the heroic efforts of the paramedics, they were long past saving. That boded remarkably well, assuming they were the right three guys.

Sands lit himself another cigarette, rolling it slowly with thumb and fingers between drags as he listened. One woman babbled high and fast and repeated about the big man in the mariachi suit with the big guns, who disappeared in a final flash of explosion and smoke, and Sands smiled. El never let him down, always added that extra flourish to the staging.

The Lesson was definitely on its way out to those who needed to hear it.

He hoped El had enjoyed his encore. With cameras starting to come built into more of the new cells as standard, that kind of street theatre was going to be a bit too much of an indiscretion for future use.

Sands crushed his smoke into the ashtray, and went to rescue the laundry before it turned into a big ball of creases. He could manage his own washing just fine, but he was never going to be real handy with an iron now; much easier to stay looking sharp if he bypassed that particular inconvenience.

He shed his robe in favour of jeans and T-shirt, warm and light from the drier settling over his skin, clinging with a hint of static. He kept one ear cocked towards the radio as he folded the clothes into neat piles, but there was nothing new coming now, just the same comments, the same audience-enticing witnesses on rolling repeat.

He was in the bedroom hanging shirts in the closet when the engine came, familiar, learned over the weeks, rumbling to a halt outside. Footsteps past the window, and all three sets were there, regular and even, El still chinking bright beneath his big disguising overcoat, hidden only from people who thought their eyes could tell them everything. The key turned in the lock as Sands picked up the shades from the nightstand and slid them over his face.

The door slammed back against the stopper, shuddering heavy, and the brat bounced fast across the main room to a sliding halt right under Sands' feet. "That was fucking fantastic!" And okay, Sands hadn't bothered to shut the door when he was carrying an armful of laundry, and alone, but the kid knew well enough where he stood with Sands, and it wasn't in his fucking bedroom.

The shorter, quicker steps of the dipso were next, then finally El, closing and chaining the door after him with quiet, methodical clicks, shrugging out of the coat and dropping it over the chair. Soft, slow feet with muted metal overtones padding over to the table and helping himself to Sands' cigarettes in the hissing flare of a match. And with the kid in the apartment too.

El had hit the down-slope already, and was sliding fast.

"The look on that skinny bastard's face when El leaped out from behind those prissy bushes and stuck the shotgun up his nose! You should have seen it! Tell him, El!" It was like having a face full of outsized, enthusiastically muddy Labrador.

El came through into the bedroom in a heavy cloud of smoke, weighted thunk of the glass ashtray placed on the nightstand. "The plan worked exactly as we said, every detail."

"Fideo smacked that car so hard it nearly bounced back into me. Stupid fuck of a driver had no seatbelt, mashed his face on the wheel, we took him out before he could even think what the fuck was going on." Ah, yes, that perfect, vicious icing, layered smooth all across the surface when it was needed. Putting Lorenzo in the tail car had been a nice touch on so many grounds.

Fideo was predictably reintroducing himself to the bottles lined up alongside the sofa, too busy replenishing his blood alcohol levels to offer a comment on his role, or anybody else's.

"Christ, El, you gotta do that inside? It's bad enough holed up with the psycho, not that I'd expect him to listen." The kid's voice was wearing a distinctly wrinkled nose, but still too excitable to show any real teeth.

"You're in my room," El pointed out, followed by the distinctive double breath as he drew in more smoke. "And I stink, and I'd like to take a shower."

"Yeah, yeah, I can take a goddamn hint," the kid said with an audio eye-roll. "I'll cut you some slack this once, with getting that asshole off of our backs and all, but don't think you're pulling that shit when we get back to my place or I'll kick you out the fucking door myself," he finished with a grin.

The door shut behind Lorenzo with too much of a bang, and Sands tipped his head El's way in amusement. "Shower, my ass. You wanna fuck."

"Can't I do both?" El's voice was heavy with the drag of tension.

Sands lifted his eyebrows, let his lips curl a hint at the edges. "Well, that depends. Which one are you prioritising?"

El screwed the smoke into the ashtray and closed the gap between them, his body pushing Sands back to the wall. "You." Blood and sweat and gunpowder clawed stronger through Sands' nose, and he smiled.

"That works for me."

El pressed forward, warmth of breath through Sands' hair, lips and hint of teeth along his neck. "You smell good."

"I smell like soap and laundry detergent, lightly smoked," Sands pointed out.

"I know."

Sands tilted his head as if considering, and El's heat pushed deeper into the gap, a rasping brush over the tingling sensitivity of his own freshly-shaved skin. "Well, I suppose anything's better than dead guy, and tequila gets a bit over-sweet confined to the inside of a car." He shifted his leg around El's, wound his fingers into one of the chains at El's thigh, tugging the fabric tighter at the crotch.

"Shower," El said, releasing the pressure against him to snatch his fingers away and pull him in the direction of the bathroom. Sands peeled off the glasses as he followed, and smiled.

Just three more days and they'd be out of this miserable piss-pot country forever; and for now there was a great screw on offer, the tiles of the stall pressed damp against his hands, the beat of the water over his back, the flow of it twining all round the skin down his legs to enhance the pull of El's hand on his cock.

Like El said, the plan was running exactly as intended, every detail.


	5. Chapter 5

He was going to be sick.

He wasn't, not literally, not while he held the last remnants of control over it anyway, because he was pretty sure the lingering taste of vomit wouldn't be any improvement over the rolling queasiness he was living with now, and because he wouldn't give Lorenzo the goddamn satisfaction.

"So she's got her ass up on the counter, jiggling her tits in my face, and she hitches up her skirt, and then she says, 'Hey, but what about the armadillo?'"

Fideo spluttered into his bottle, the stink of booze thickening through the car, and El was laughing alongside Sands, light, relaxed, comfortable.

And right there was another reason to hate the brat, as if he didn't have enough waiting in line already, being forced to share a day-long road trip with somebody who would not _shut the fuck up._

The car shook to an abrupt halt, lurching him forward against his tensed seatbelt, then swerved right at the intersection to accelerate away again, hard.

Sands leaned closer into the door, into the stream of air through his cracked-open window, the flow over his skin letting at least two of his senses agree on the whole motion issue. The cross-country stretches weren't so bad - there was only so much even the kid could do to fuck up a straight line fifty-five - but every time they hit a town it was like riding a seedy mechanical bull in a cheap tourist bar that hadn't refurbished since the height of the eighties, the kind of place where he'd be peeling his shoes off of the floorboards with every step.

At least this was almost the end of it.

He was never goddamn car-sick.

Okay, he'd never gotten sea-sick before either, and he sure as fuck did now, but _El_ never made him car-sick. At least not after that first week when he was all doped up on morphine-lite, and the drugs would screw with anybody's brain-stomach combo.

There was a soft rustle from Fideo that was all too obvious, and the top was grating back onto that bottle of his.

Sands straightened up on the seat and pushed his jacket open a little wider, because the kid hadn't opened his mouth to do more than breathe the last couple of blocks, the speed dropping from the car, and maybe this was one of those little mercies he wasn't gonna be so grateful for.

He buzzed down his window most of the way, tipped his head into the inflowing air, reaching for the sounds outside.

"What's wrong?" No surprise El had picked up on it too.

"Not sure." Lorenzo's fingers were restless on the wheel, a low plastic tapping. "Some of the neighbours are watching."

Sands lifted a hand from his lap, flexing his joints through the glove as if examining them. "Isn't that what neighbours do?"

"My neighbours like me, asshole. This is staring, and trying to make like they're not."

"Somebody they don't like has been here," El said. "Somebody who went to your house."

"You should probably pass on the trip home," Sands offered mildly. "I'm thinking another place to stay would be less problematic."

"Fuck that, it's my goddamn house. And it's probably just you they don't like."

"But they never got the chance to know me," Sands smiled towards the rear view mirror.

Lorenzo angled the car to a drifting halt and clicked on the parking brake, pulling over on the street instead of swinging it around into the driveway.

The car was silent, just the light, even sounds of breath, and the slow thrum of idling engine.

One of the dogs set off barking a few houses down the street, some small yappy bit Sands had learned to recognise, and it was shushed fast enough by the good neighbourly owner. The breeze brought green scents and the tentative tang of salt, the low buzz of cars rising from the main highway lower down the hill, a few distinct, well-bred engines rising and falling as they crawled between the intersections of nearby streets. Whistled rustle of leaves from some bush or low tree as the wind gusted through, the seconds of it enough to obliterate the voices that carried.

It hadn't ever been a noisy neighbourhood this time of the afternoon, but maybe there weren't so many kids playing in the yards, maybe less of the chat leaking from open windows.

At least Sands' stomach had decided for sure it wasn't gonna show its insides to the world right now, even if it might be a while still before he'd try taking a coffee on board.

"I don't see anything," Fideo said, something close on fifteen minutes later. "If anybody's here, they're waiting us out."

"You might want to check with a couple of those drape-twitchers who seem to know what's going on," Sands suggested. "Seeing how they like you so much better than your visitors."

"Shit, no, they'll ask too many goddamn questions," Lorenzo said. "I've gotta live here when you've pissed off back where you came from, and I want it so I can make like nothing happened."

"Your choice," Sands shrugged. "It's never mine to go poking into holes without knowing exactly where the snake is."

"Yeah, and most people aren't like you." The kid's door clicked open, followed immediately by Fideo's. "El?"

Brief brush of knuckles at Sands' thigh, and then El was leaving too, with another rush of air through the car.

Footsteps tapping away, easy to follow them through the open window, separating on the path out front of the house to circle round; El going counter, brightly there, then lost as he left pavement.

Sands took a cigarette from the pack in his pocket, losing the flame to the breeze twice over before he finally had it lit.

He smoked slow, forearm slung over the sill between drags, letting the wind take the ash as his brain filtered automatically through the sounds. Kids, cars, bugs, same old shit.

He wasn't hearing gunfire, and if anything was going to happen in there, it wouldn't be quiet.

Something right on the edge of his hearing, hazed by distance or walls, something sharp and high and vivid like glass.

He tipped his head, reaching, but it didn't come again.

It was another few minutes before the footsteps were back, the kid first, then a second set that was pure El, fast and purposeful.

Sands turned El's way as he slid in. "So what did they leave as a calling card?"

"The doors are rigged." It was Lorenzo who answered him, voice tight. "Plastic on tripwires."

"Friendly. What do you plan on doing about it?"

"Fideo's dealing with it," El said. "We broke a window to get him in."

Sands steered the stare of his lenses toward the driver's seat. "You're going to trust _him_ to de-bomb your house? He's got hands like an eighty-year-old grandma with Parkinson's."

A quick rustle-shrug was his reaction, the words unconcerned. "Explosives are his toys, not mine."

"But I notice the both of you are out here." Sands offered a quick, close-lipped smile to the mirror.

"Something can always go wrong," El said, soft.

"Just how wrong are we talking here? Since neither of you have bothered to warn any of those nice neighbours, I assume you're looking at losing a room, not the whole building."

"Oh, they didn't get excited," Lorenzo said, that vicious burn curling back up to the surface through his voice. "Definitely anti-personnel style, heavy on the shrapnel."

"Well, I suppose you could say that was thoughtful. The rest of the street will appreciate the gesture if one goes off."

"They're not going off."

"Is that blind faith talking, or is it actually justified? It makes no difference to me, you understand, so long as those special kitchen cupboards of yours have nice thick doors, but I do like to satisfy my idle curiosity."

Feet headed their way along the sidewalk gagged any retort the kid might have made, a woman's shoes, light and clicking. Short, fast steps, the three of them sitting in silence as she passed, and Lorenzo would be following her ass view, checking her out.

Sands wondered idly how she scored, if those quick little steps were forced on her by a skirt clinging close round her thighs, her calves stretched out by the heels, if her tits were high and neat under her shirt or if she'd already been sucked on by too many brats.

Lorenzo was probably more interested in checking out her clothes and her watch for retail value, old habits sticking tighter than that skirt.

Sands lit a cigarette and passed it across to El, then another for himself before buzzing his window closed. The kid still got to pay for that purgatorial road trip.

"No boom, then," Sands commented dryly when Fideo's quick, barely uneven feet tapped back towards the car. It was something of a pity – Lorenzo's reaction would have been extreme and revealing, and a useful weakness to work a little pressure at.

El would've gotten over it, he always did.

"They did a neat job, simple," Fideo said, dropping back into the passenger seat. "Simple means easy to fix too, but they weren't trying to change that. One way or another, if it's found, it won't work."

"So did they have us before or after we hit them?" El asked.

"After," Sands said, immediate, certain. "If they'd been sure before, they would've come for us in Morelia, not here. And besides, the reactions of the neighbours haven't started to wear off yet, so those visitors were recent."

"Yeah, and you're the one who said taking out Ayala would fix everything." Lorenzo's voice was icy with sharp-pointed accusation.

"Oh, I don't think I put it quite like that."

"Who gives a shit how you put it, you set us on the wrong fucking guy!"

Sands stretched out his legs, toes pushing beneath the seat in front of him, wriggled his shoulders back firmer to the support. "Actually, I think the miscalculation might have been in the assumption that there was a single instigator, when there could have been two working the others together. Removing one left the other exposed, and now he's getting desperate."

"So we're back in the same place we started at, 'cept now they've pinned us for sure and they're gonna keep on coming. While we do what the fuck, exactly? Hole up for weeks and wait for you to come up with another grand scheme?"

Sands curled his lips into a tight, closed smile. "Oh, I've got a pretty good idea who it is we need to look into - the name that came right up at the top of that list of phone calls."

"Why should we listen to you after you fucked up?"

Sands only stretched the smile wider. "Are you going to try and tell me Bozo here never screwed you over in a fight?"

"Hey, hey, who're you calling Bozo?"

"I could make it Booze-o if you want to be pedantic about it."

"I can still shoot straight, and I don't screw up."

"Right, you just make fucked up choices like you and me taking on an entire goddamn army," Lorenzo not-quite-muttered. So that was the specifics of El's idea of 'a little rash', Sands mused. Definitely one to keep in mind for future avoidance.

"They died and we got rich," Fideo said cheerfully. "Nothing to complain about that I see."

"Well, there sure as shit is this time, now I can't go home." Lorenzo twisted in his seat to aim the words straight at Sands.

Sands cracked open his door and tossed the last of his cigarette out onto the street. "Like I said, he's getting desperate. And rash, with moves like this one."

"Oh, rash, sure, like they wired my house on a fucking whim."

"It's indirect, too easy to circumvent, and too likely to take out the wrong target. It's uncontrolled and unprofessional, and it's tipped us off rather nicely." Sands flashed his eyebrows high and smiled wide. "We wanted to rattle some people, and I guess we did."

"Yeah, we pissed off a pit viper and you're laughing," the kid snapped. "Funny how I'm still waiting on your genius suggestion to fix it."

"We talk about it somewhere else," El said, lashed tight in his don't-piss-me-off-any-more tone. "We get what we need from the house and we leave."

"I can roll with that," Lorenzo said, and the three mariachis swung open their doors, smoke clearing from the car in the sweep of breeze. "What about him?"

"Everything of mine's already in the trunk," Sands pointed out. "El can stock us up on the rest." Picking through hundreds of boxes of ammo trying to find the nine mils wasn't his idea of a fun way to spend a couple of hours, especially when El could get the job done in under ten minutes. Though it might take a little longer this time, double-checking everything for any more traps, and there was another reason for Sands not to go roaming round the house prodding at things. He might as well be bored sitting out here as in there.

Besides, there was an added advantage to having somebody outside, an early warning in case any more visitors decided to show up. The neighbours might not all be as strongly pro-Lori as he thought they were, especially if they were sweetened up with a wad of extra cash for making just one quick call.

Sands' watch was already set to bleep off the quarters. He liked it that way for the car trips, it gave him an idea of where the hell they'd be without him forever groping at the goddamn thing.

It was close on thirty minutes before the mariachis came back, but nobody else of interest had been around between, just a couple of chattering locals. The car shivered and readjusted beneath Sands as weighted bags thumped into the trunk, and again as the lid closed with a slam.

Keys rattled in the kid's hand, then stilled abruptly. "I'll drive," El said. "You need a break."

"Nah, I can go all day." The kid's grin was as obvious as the wink in the tone. "I'm fine."

"And I want you to stay that way," El said, smiling. "You should take a break when it's offered."

"Okay, okay, if it makes you happy, take 'em." The kid's eyes were rolling as the keys changed hands, and he slid into the back alongside Sands. Not Sands' preferred choice of travelling companion, but it had to be a level or two better than letting the fucker drive.

"Where to?" El closed the door in a controlled thunk, and he was talking to Sands, not the sidekicks.

"North would be a good start," Sands said, giving El a quick smile. "We're going to take a tour of Mexico City."

"What's in Mexico?" Lorenzo demanded.

"Among other things, your second man. I assume you'd prefer to remove him instead of running?"

There was quite a pause before the kid answered, and it wasn't the question he was evaluating. "Sure, why the fuck not?" he said eventually. "I just wanna get this shit done, then I can come home."

Sands angled himself into the corner of the seat against the door, vibrations rippling through him as the engine fired up, and tipped his head towards Lorenzo. "You still plan on coming back? You might do better to ditch the place."

"It's my fucking _house._ I bought it, with _my money_."

Sands twitched his eyebrows higher. "Well, that's debatable."

"The President gave us that cash for saving his life."

"And since all that dough was drug money used to pay for an assassination attempt, I'd say it technically belonged to the police evidence locker and was never El Presidente's to give away."

Lorenzo snorted. "Like your cash is so honestly come by."

Sands quirked his lips up into a smile. "Not often, no, but at least I admit it."

"You think I won't? I don't give a shit where it came from, it's better off ending up with me than oozing out bit by bit in the pockets of every bent bastard in the police." Lorenzo leaned forward to El's shoulder as the car slowed for the intersection. "Take a right, we better stop by Fideo's place and check that too."

"Why bother?" Sands said. "If it's already wired, you've got the hassle of removing explosives from a place we don't want to be, and if it isn't then we lead them right to it."

El stopped the car, with no tick from the turn signal. "Is there anything you need there?"

Fideo shrugged. "Nothing I need that badly."

"Would anybody else go in if you're not around?"

"Nobody comes to visit, 'cept for Lori."

"Then we stay away." The car pulled out, taking the straight route.

"So what happens when we get to Mexico?" At least the dipso stayed consistent - if it was good with El, it was good with him, no contradictions. Sands could be feeling a good deal more amenable towards Fideo by now, if the stench of booze in a confined space didn't start to fray with constant exposure.

"We get an apartment," Sands decided. "Not a tourist place, a real one. We don't know how long we'll need to be there, and our guy's going to be looking out for us, but it's a big city and he can't check everywhere." He rattled through the thoughts as the obvious pieces dropped into place, connecting up in his head. "In the suburbs, not central - it's easier to stay lost in there, and I can get us paperwork good enough to pass the few checks they make out in Locale Low-Cost." Slumming it wasn't top of his list of choices, but neither was catching any more bullets in dick-leech Mexico, especially not for the good cause of getting the sidekicks' shit sorted out. "That gives us the space to work out the details on the guy."

"We need to switch the car," El said. "People have seen us in this one."

"We do that in Chilpancingo." It was maybe thirty-five miles, they'd be there in an hour. "He won't know where we've gone from there, but I'm sure he'll guess," Sands added with a smile.

"No shit," Lorenzo said. "We didn't exactly run and hide with the last guy, he'll figure we're coming for him too."

And that was the part that was definitely going to put this assignment on the interesting side of routine. Sands didn't foresee quite so much boredom wrapped around the planning of this one as he'd suffered over the last month.

It could be quite a fine line right there between 'interesting' and 'messy'. He wondered which side this one was going to fall.

The trip to Mexico was tedious and unremarkable. They swapped out one car with doubtful paperwork for another fast enough, and lost that one in turn on the city's outskirts. They left Lorenzo in charge of the apartment search and signing the paperwork – El and Sands were obviously out, and only the desperate would sign their property over to Fideo. The kid had the right face and the right charm from years of spinning the con on women, and he'd come across almost respectable if he didn't paste up the billboard notice that he had way too much cash for a guy his age. By the time a would-be landlord made it past the glow and worry and the endless chatter of the new father whose wife was in hospital with the preemie twins, and thought to ask for ID and paperwork, Sands had it on hand already.

After several prolonged, pointless and often circular discussions, they finally bought an '02 Chevrolet Chevy that none of them liked, except Fideo, because he liked anywhere he could pass out in reasonable comfort with a bottle. It wasn't up to the preferences of Lorenzo and Sands, and newer than El's choices, but it was common and cheap enough to be unremarkable, while still hanging onto some level of power and mechanical reliability. They picked up an older model to switch it with too, to keep tailing and surveillance a little less sun-on-wet-road glaring.

With the basics in place, Sands was left feeling for ways to get the dirt on a paranoid killer, without sending vibrations down any of the long, invisible cobweb strands the man would have splayed out all across the city.

He'd done some of the background already, when he was working through Lorenzo's list of names, so he wasn't trying to fire up from empty. But he couldn't tap any of the usual sources - anyone Sands could pay, Salinas could pay more, and you could bet your bitch he'd be keeping check. The guy's main house and his not-so-secret stash pad for his mistress were off limits like a Compton ghetto. Sands couldn't access even the basic plans, not any way that wouldn't let Salinas put a tab on him, and details on staff and security were locked up tighter than a virgin's cunt.

He'd worked on guys more dangerous, more loaded and more jumpy, and more than once. But with a background team to cover the angles, with access to satellite images and phone taps and every bit of tech he could half-way justify to a budgeting committee. And never when the target of interest had a line on him personally.

After a few days, he was starting to feel he was completely fucked.

Oh, there were things he could have tried, people he could have risked approaching, but only if he wanted the equivalent risk of something suddenly blowing up in his face, and not in a tidy metaphorical way.

This time, somebody else was gonna have to do the approaching.

When there were possibilities in place El might need a little time to get used to, it was always best to start him early.

"I'm saying we could stay buried alive in this econobox for six months and he still wouldn't be a man we can easily get close to."

"You're saying we're fucked," Lorenzo said in disgust.

"Hardly." Sands gave him a flashed smile. "I've got a few ideas."

"Like what?" Fideo asked.

"Well, he has a daughter in university," Sands said, lifting his tone to casual conversation. "We can get to her any time."

"No." The word came flat and quiet from Sands' right, just where he expected.

"She doesn't even need to know she's in play." Sands turned his head meaningfully Lorenzo's way and smiled. "I can think of a dozen entirely non-violent ways we can access her right now."

"We don't go near her."

It was the tripwire voice glittering quietly in his head, and Sands had no intention of tugging.

El's kid would still have been in elementary if she hadn't so untimely and literally chewed on her mouthful of dust, so no direct empathy link there; but El could get funny over anything involving kids, including, apparently, the grown up versions.

Sands hadn't thought it would fly, but it would have been stupid not to toss it up there and take a look.

"You said you had a few ideas." Fideo's prompting cut the silence before it could stretch. "So what are the others?"

Sands flipped the top on his carton of cigarettes and put one to his lips. "Well, if you don't like the easy option, things get a bit more complex." Flick of the lighter wheel and sharp sting of smoke, and he exhaled through smiling teeth. "It leaves us tailing him and snatching at an opportunity in that same undisciplined ambush plan we disliked so much with Ayala. Or it leaves us sending him an invitation."

"You want us to play bait," Lorenzo said, edged, resentful. A shuffle as he sat upright from his sprawl on the floor.

"Not precisely, since the bait won't actually have to be there."

"Bait as ourselves, or someone else?" El again, shifting close, interested, and he'd worked with Sands long enough now to see the possibilities tunnelling through his mind.

"Oh, someone else, it's less risky that way." Sands tipped his head towards El, the slow flow of breath moving light and warm over his cheek. "However itchy he may be feeling about a bullet in the back, he's still a man with a lot of businesses and a lot of investment to keep watch over. We approach one of his contacts, let them know the kind of person we're interested in dealing with. He'll put us in touch and arrange a meet."

"He'll never buy it, he'll guess it's a set-up." The kid talked fast and certain, the street smarts that almost explained why El kept him on hand as backup.

"That's the drawback to the plan, yes," Sands said, his smile quick and wide. He let smoke drift thick and bitter through his nose, reached to flick his cigarette over the ashtray. "The good part is we get to control the place and time and lay everything out in advance. We can make it a hotel room – it's common procedure, neutral ground, anonymous for everyone concerned. We've got as long as we like to check out hotels, pick one that's accessible by some means other than the front door."

"Then we throw out a line, and hook in that contact," Lorenzo finished. "That's my job."

Sands quirked his lips, the cigarette angling between them. "Unfortunately not."

"Why not?" The anger was always there, simmering under the kid's skin, flashing outwards at any whiff of provocation on the breeze. "I spin a line like a pro, I'd be perfect."

"Yes, you would, and that's the problem." Sands propped his elbow on the arm of the sofa, rolling the cigarette between thumb and fingers beside his cheek. "The surveillance they ran on you was casual, indirect, asking a few of the locals to keep tabs on any activity. It's likely he doesn't have photos, but I don't doubt he'll have descriptions, and if a pretty kid dripping charm and a dentist's wall grin starts asking after him, I can guarantee he won't be coming out to play." He crushed the rest of his smoke into the ashtray – it tasted stale, from a pack bought new yesterday. Fucking Mexico. "Fideo's a little more non-descript, and he was safely holed up drunk most of the time you were being checked on."

"See, Lori?" Fideo said, bright in a rustle of cloth. "You don't get to complain any more, it comes in useful sometimes." Sands could imagine him waving his bottle in victory at the validation.

"His descriptions of me will be even poorer than Fideo's," El said, steady and thoughtful. "We can't be sure how Fideo would work out, and I've done it before, lied to these earth-crawlers."

It really wasn't what Sands had in mind, sending El out alone to play verbal tag with a target already primed and suspecting; that was what sidekicks were designed for.

Unfortunately, it also made sense.

He reached over to pluck the pack of smokes from El's left pocket, peeling back the foil. "Just remember you're not allowed to kill this one. At least not yet," he added with a smile. "We'll need him around a while longer."

"No, no goddamn way, you're not fucking doing this." Lorenzo was up on his feet in a single smooth movement and padding Sands' way, all the effortless reaction and speed that made him such an efficient killer. "You're doing it again, pushing El out up front to take the shit if things get hot, and it's not gonna happen." He stopped just inches from Sands' steel-tipped shoes, and the point he really shouldn't cross - so much of El's innate skill in there, and barely any of the control.

Sands ran his fingers to the tip of his cigarette and lit it carefully, slipping the lighter back inside his jacket. "You think I want it this way? This job's wearing my trademark, it's what I do, but as you informed us all, these nice Mexican friends of yours have my photo."

"You've got some cute excuse lined up for everything, don't you?"

Sands dropped his head to the back of the sofa, lenses staring up at the kid, and added a hint of smile. "I suppose you'd prefer it if I simply reacted without reason, like you?" He wondered if El would choose to make an entrance any time now, but sometimes El seemed to grow bored with that role and left the kid to bait his own trap.

"I've got reasons, right out up front for everybody to see. For every one of yours we get a look at, there's four more boxed away, so I wanna know what your angle is. What are you getting out of making El the front man for all this shit?"

"I don't make El do anything," Sands said evenly. "Unless you have some severe aural hygiene issues, you must have heard him volunteer. I really don't see what your problem is."

"My problem is that El's my friend, and you're some kind of twisted fucking monster who doesn't have a _fucking _clue what that means." The kid hadn't taken that last, dangerous step, but he was leaning in, pushing closer, loud and intrusive in a wave of forcefully expelled breath.

Sands exhaled smoke in a slow, steady stream, crossed his feet at the ankles and tipped his head a little to the left. "Did you know that your oh-so-good friend here had plans to ditch you, never to be seen again?"

The silence from Lorenzo was immensely satisfying, a silence that lasted more than long enough for the kid to look to El and get the confirmation he wouldn't hide.

"You know why," El said quietly, after the stares had dragged out more than long enough.

"I know we don't need your goddamn twisted take on protection. Sometimes we might want your help, mostly we just want you, don't you get that?"

"He gets it," Fideo said. "It just doesn't change anything."

El hooked a foot up onto his knee, weight shifting forwards as his hands dropped to rest on his ankle. "Does it matter so much what I thought before? I'm here now."

"It matters when the idea's still stuck in that fucking thick skull of yours." Lorenzo had subsided from yelling to what could only be described as sullen, sounding more like a kid than ever. But he backed off from Sands to fling himself over the sofa arm alongside El, and presumably glare at him. "What the fuck we gotta do to kick it outta there, huh?"

Sands uncrossed his ankles and got up to make his exit, leaving what remained of El's smoke to burn out in the ashtray. If anything, it tasted worse than his own, and he had no interest in listening to the mariachis poke through a years-old issue with no chance of a resolution. He was only bored of being the convenient target for all the brat's frustrations and ill-temper - El could fence some of that shit for a while.

The voices were still there with the bedroom door between them, but Sands didn't bother to tease out the words from the drone. He fired up the laptop and ran another search on Salinas, just in case anything novel dropped out, but it was all old news. He pulled the files on Salinas' feeders for review, the guys who'd point them up the chain if someone approached them with an order they couldn't fill. They got one shot, and they needed to pick the right guy – big enough it was reasonable they'd go to him in the first place, but nobody too sharp who might just tag the vibes coming off of El. Salinas didn't promote idiots, so it had to be a delicately balanced choice.

The background voices dropped off as the files read back to him, Little Lori's inputs quieter and the gaps stretching longer between. Shortly afterwards El's boots tapped towards the bedroom, as expected.

El closed the door behind him, quiet, and didn't step away, resting his body against the frame.

So it was going to be a 'discussion'. Tedious, but unsurprising.

"You didn't have to tell him that," El said.

Sands swung the chair round from the laptop to offer El a small, quirked smile. "You don't think your 'friend' should know the truth, if it's not convenient for you?"

"He knows it anyway," El said with a shrug. "He just doesn't like to look at it."

Sands curled the smile a few degrees higher. "Well, everybody gets stuck with shit they don't like sometimes, El, I don't see why the brat should be an exception. Not when you and me are all set to throw ourselves into the firing line on behalf of those idiots, because they were too stupid to make themselves inconspicuous when it counted."

"No." El's voice hardened and flattened on the single word. "You don't get to blame them."

"Why the fuck not? They're the ones who summoned you back to this stinking slurry pit."

"You can't blame them because _I _did this." El took three strides into the room, then stopped still, a couple of feet away; Sands could almost feel the air quiver against his skin under the fast-rising words. "I did this when I brought in my friends to get you back. And now we're paying for it – you, me, Lorenzo, Fideo, we're all paying for it, and I don't regret it."

"Well, I fucking do," Sands snapped. "It wasn't the brightest choice you ever made, El. That warehouse was just temporary storage, you didn't need them."

"I could have gone there alone, yes, and I could have killed everybody there, killed _that man._"El was almost spitting the last two words, the hatred curled behind them flashing through in the moments before he dragged the control back into place, words falling quieter. "But not with any real chance of reaching you before they shot you. For that I needed help."

"Except you didn't, because I'd already taken care of that angle perfectly well myself."

"I wasn't willing to risk that," El said, flat.

"And meanwhile, I was in there hanging every plan I put together round the assumption that you were coming back. Something of a pity you couldn't bring yourself to trust me, because there'd have been no reason to have dragged ourselves away from a perfectly reasonable lifestyle and back to this miserable pisshole if you'd had the same kind of faith."

"Faith?" El half-turned away on the balls of his feet, his breath almost laughter, and bitter as ninety percent cocoa. "I've had faith in the past, in other people, in God, and none of it ever stopped them from dying."

Sands curled a smile wide and cold. "You know, El, for a guy who lights candles and mutters in corners before he kills people, you talk a lot like an atheist."

Quick rustle of distinctive denial. "God is here. He has to be. I'm just not so sure He involves Himself the way I used to believe." El's words had slowed, calmed, the frustration eased from his voice. "I think maybe He gives us our own lives to live, and the ways to deal with the consequences of what we choose."

It was interesting sometimes to poke at El on the god thing, and see what dropped out. In most ways, El was a deeply practical guy – if someone pissed him off, he killed them, if someone tried to shoot him, he killed them. If he was lonely, and the only person around making the offer was a man, he fucked a man. But there was still that last knot of superstitious bullshit he wouldn't untangle himself from; no matter how fucked up his life got, he just picked up the whole baseball diamond and moved it to fit the play.

Religion really was the most appallingly sticky form of brainwashing. The CIA could have learned a lot from its techniques.

"Screw god," Sands said, huffing a breath down his nose. "He's no fucking help and I'm happy to hear you admit it, but it would be nice to think you had some confidence in me."

Scuff of boot on tile as El shifted back his way, words low and shaped by curiosity. "Everything you're talking about happened almost a year ago. Why argue over it now?"

"Are you going to tell me anything's changed?"

"I know you better now than I did," El said, no pause, no gap for his thoughts. "I've seen how you do things."

"And what the fuck does that mean in more practical terms?"

"I trust you the same way I trust Fideo, or Lorenzo."

Well, that wasn't so goddamn flattering, being held equivalent in competence to a drunk and a kid. But El probably thought of it as a fucking compliment, and it was the best he was likely to get.

El padded over to the bed, footsteps quiet and even, sat himself on its edge. "You know who I am," he said. "You always did."

Yeah, and that freeway length protective streak that fixated and clung unwavering was a big chunk of why Sands had trusted El enough early enough to keep him around, but it could also be goddamn inconvenient, as the brat was getting thoroughly clued in on. "I know your issues are gonna turn some easy play into a serious fuck up if you don't get a lock on them."

"If you want your life to be easy, you stayed with the wrong man." No humour in El's line, it was just planted out there as flat statement.

"Sorry, El, no sacrificial martyrs required this time." The smile Sands gave him still wasn't headed towards friendly. "After all, I get bored with 'easy' even quicker than you do. But it might be pleasant if you could find the middle path a little more often, less of the lurching between ridiculous extremes."

El shook his head, slow, distinct. "I can't change."

Sands raised his eyebrows and laughed out a couple of short breaths. "Fuck, El, you change faster than just about anybody I ever knew. From dust town guitar-maker to mass assassin could seem quite a leap, but you cover it in seconds."

"The guitar-maker was never really me. He was what I wanted once, but it was too late for that."

"Yeah, and it was way too fucking long before you'd look at it and see it." At home, Sands would have walked now, left El to simmer on it for a while, but the only place to go was back out there with the sidekicks. Hardly his preferred option, and definitely not with the brat sprawled smirking over the sofa, getting his jollies from the caustic voices. "But as you're feeling too stubborn to listen, I have these files still waiting for me, the ones that are going to salvage your 'friends' for you." He twisted the chair back around to the laptop, pushed his earphone in and hit resume. Then a second time because the fucking thing had dropped into sleep mode.

El rose from the bed and moved to stand behind him, hands falling light on his shoulders. Sands shrugged at them, but they didn't go away, and he was too busy to make an issue of it. The synthesised words halted and stumbled uneven into his ear, the patterns and complications forming slow in his head.

"Do you have an answer?" El asked eventually.

"To you being an idiot? Hardly."

"To how we run this."

"I'm working on it," Sands said, his tone even and entirely discouraging.

It was El who left, the hands sliding from Sands' shoulders, feet tapping quietly to the door, and then the murmur of subdued voices melting inwards through the wall.

Sands stayed right where he was until El called him through for lunch, thankfully peaceful for once, without the kid joking and sniping to keep the chatter rolling. Sands was pretty sure Lorenzo was dealing out more than his quota of glares and mournful stares, and entertained himself by being neutrally bland and oblivious to any hang-overs from the morning's little chats.

They started the hotel search that afternoon, ruling out any place with CCTV cameras strung out beyond the lobby and concentrating on the middle range joints. Sands and El pulled up a list of possibilities from the internet, based on size, location and what details El could figure from the photos, and then it was a two-day grind around the city, running the personal checks on every one.

Sands went along on these excursions, pissing off the kid because El took ten minutes back in the car each time to explain to Sands what the mariachis learned in seconds. But Sands didn't give a pig's turd about Lorenzo's moods – he knew Salinas, what he was likely to do, how he'd react, and he wanted all the fine print scanned in, just in case there was anything his blunt instruments might have overlooked.

Balconies and adjacent taller buildings were a plus for external access, busy streets and overlooked grounds wiped at least that particular side of the hotel from the list. The options narrowed fast, and they paid a return visit to the last few possibles, double-checking distances and El's estimated access times until they had a winner – the lucky Ground Zero for an update in blood and bullet chic.

It was a smallish place tucked down a side street; not suspiciously out of the way, just a few blocks from the arterial, but the alleys narrowed fast around it, with barely more than a service road at the rear. A family-run independent instead of a chain joint, which kept the security angle down nicely - anything to trim the costs. Fideo baulked at that last part, till Lorenzo pointed out they could always make an anonymous donation to cover the refit if the mess got out of hand. Apparently the dipso had the lingering remnants of a desire to stick up for the 'little people', when he emerged far enough from his liquid coma.

Sands took a couple more days to finalise his choice of go-between to lead them to Salinas. El really wasn't going to like it, but El didn't like anything about this whole gig, any more than Sands did. It was a question of practical options. And maybe next time El wouldn't be so fast to volunteer when he didn't know for sure what he was standing in line for.

There weren't any more angles to cover, no more reasonable delays while he checked through the threads for flaws. The fabric would either hold or it wouldn't.

It was time to send El in.


	6. Chapter 6

El didn't like it.

"No."

"You already volunteered, El, remember?"

"Not for this. Make a different plan."

"And that's why it's perfect," Sands said, smiling wide. "El Mariachi would never sit down with a drug dealer, much less pose as one, everyone knows that. We'll reel in Salinas as close to off his guard as he's ever going to be."

The pause in the snapping flow, the break with steady breath, and once El got to thinking, instead of reacting, that was the time to put the final pressure on.

"We're going to need every inch of advantage we can knot into this one." Sands reached out past his left hip, tapping the new pack of smokes on the edge of the table to loosen them. "The guy's jumpy as a sack full of cats poked with a fire iron, and if the tie unravels too soon, it'll be your friends who are left to deal with the cats." He stuck one between his lips, held out another to El, who took it without comment. "You and me, well, we'll slide out of this goat's intestine of a country, and be just fine," he added with a quick smile.

It had always been a sealed win; it had only been a question of how much talking he'd have to do to fix the game.

The rest of the plan, those were the parts that needed a little more latitude built in. And they didn't have it.

"I'm sure we can come to an arrangement." El's voice crackled and dropped briefly now across the link. "People say you're a useful man to do business with."

"Which is why I'm careful. I only deal with people who aren't a risk of tainting my good name." The reception bristled with more static, metallic when Torres spoke, the penalty of extra distance to source, but the smile still carried right through with the words.

It wasn't exactly the transmission quality Sands had paid for, and a certain supplier was going to learn the error of that choice when Sands found himself with half a day left empty, but it was giving him enough.

It wasn't the two-way comm he would've liked either, but no way would this camel-sucker have missed El wearing an earpiece.

"We both know you've already run your checks, and we wouldn't be meeting if you'd found anything you didn't like," El said easily. "So why don't we talk numbers?"

The background had always been the weakest part of the web, the part most likely to stretch and tear, and collapse their own sticky threads binding around them.

Ideally an operation like this would have used a fake identity, a trail seeded carefully through the right people and places to ensure anyone asking found the right answers, but that would have taken time Sands didn't want to spend sitting around in Mexico, and resources he didn't have easy access to any more. The limitations had obliged them to hijack somebody else's name and background - carefully selected so there was minimal risk of him having had dealings with Torres before, but negligible still wasn't zero.

With Torres satisfied and El inside, the least controlled gamble of this first phase had already dropped in their favour. Sands still didn't consider it fully sewn up though, sitting two blocks back in a beat up Chevy, listening to El trade edged lines with a long-term player. As he'd pointed out to El when he hooked it into his shirt, the transmitter meant they'd know when and why any fuck-ups happened. It didn't mean they'd be close enough to fix it, if El happened to find himself with more of a lapful than he could handle.

In the driver's seat, Lorenzo was restless and twitching, fingers tapping light and fast and hollow on the cheap plastic dash. Sands curled his lips in tight, exhaling a long stream of smoke forward between the seats, and the kid swore.

Sands had offered up the choice – windows sealed so they could both follow the chit-chat, or windows down and Sands wore an earpiece so they didn't broadcast to the passing world. The kid had bitched predictably enough, but he'd picked El over his lungs.

His loyalty might have been touching, if it didn't paint him so vividly as the pathetic sad-eyed puppy.

"Call me curious," Torres was saying now. "You seem like a man who has his business running smoothly, and now you're looking for a change?" Christ, this guy should be the one trying to replace Honaker, he must have taken classes. He'd be an easy shoe-in for Salinas, when the boss met with his upcoming demise.

"My usual line of supply dried up suddenly about a month ago. I'd just taken a delivery, and I can fill some gaps with smaller businesses, but you'll understand I need a more reliable, long term arrangement in place."

That part of the story had been an easy fit to tailor for. Some government agency or other was always taking herbicide or machetes to somebody's coca fields somewhere.

It was enough to satisfy Torres, because business was officially on. "So what schedule did you have in mind?"

"In some ways I work like you do," El said carefully. "If I hadn't heard the right things about you, I wouldn't be here, but I'd still like to check quality for myself. Let's say twenty now, and assuming I'm satisfied, nine hundred on a regular four month timetable."

A pause and some distorted, unidentifiable scratching sounds. Sands gave a quick smile – selecting the right numbers to offer up had been another one of those delicate touches. "Why the long delays? More regular deliveries are easier on the line of supply, and there's less to lose if a transport should meet with misfortune."

"The President's watchdogs have been taking more of an interest in our industry lately, but they only sniff around where they have reason to suspect." El spoke slowly, as if he was choosing his words, even though this answer had been meticulously rehearsed. Sands shifted on the seat, the Coke can between his knees sliding chill against the layer of sweat over his skin. He might need to start assessing El a little more closely in future, if he was getting this good at faking his own habits and responses. "Less regular shipments are less likely to attract attention. Besides, if I ran my operations your way, I would have found myself with some problems when my last supplier went out of business."

"Nine hundred's a lot of stock to find at short notice." The words were neutral, all fact, but if it hadn't been a problem, Torres wouldn't have said anything at all.

"I heard you are a man who gets things done. I'm sure you can arrange it."

_Careful, El._ It was a useful move most times, flattering the middle ranks, but give the guy too much and he'd start to believe it. Try and close the deal without referring them up the line.

Christ, he wanted that two-way. Sands hadn't been able to coach El on every possible twist to the chat, and El was quick, but this wasn't the realm his experience was tuned for.

"I'm sure I can, but I wouldn't like to make a deal without being certain I can meet it. I'll double-check some shipping schedules and get back to you tomorrow."

It was a dismissal, but it was also El's cue to steer this meet up the driveway and park it neatly in the garage. "If you're thinking of importing to meet demand, I need to know who's supplying. I want to be sure it's somebody with a reputation for good product."

A pause while Torres considered his answer, the pause that would tell whether Sands and El had measured this guy up close enough, the suit pulled tight in all the right places. The pause while he decided whether to concede or to lie, and El didn't give off the vibes of a man it was wise to lie to. "That's something I'd need to discuss with them first, if it turns out to be necessary," Torres offered carefully.

"Obviously," El said, almost relaxed now, with something like a smile. Notching down the threat in reward for good behaviour, smooth choice. "I wouldn't want to work with anyone who didn't keep the basic precautions."

"I'll be in touch."

This time, El grabbed at the hint, the scrape of chair loud and buzzing with static through the car. "I'm looking forward to it."

It was only because Sands really listened, because he _knew_, that the sinister edge glinted along the words.

Long, even rush of breath from the kid in the front of the car, and El's feet tapping steady and unhurried across the link. Sands was still monitoring the final exchanges, the delicate mid-warm pleasantries as El ended the meet and got himself politely the hell out, but part of his mind was already sliding forwards, into the next stage, going over what they had of the plan, re-checking for flaws.

The final snap-click of a self-locking door, and El was back out on the street, headed for the other car, one that Fideo had been sitting in the whole time, because Sands wasn't being caught out by any more Honaker-style trackers slipped on board their transportation. El had made it work, and was on his way back to the apartment.

Which the puppy took as his cue to start fucking yapping again. "Well, that's a real nice job you've done there, teaching El to talk just like a goddamn psycho."

It was almost amusing how talking, for the brat, so often seemed to mean taking a jab at Sands.

Sands turned his face full to Lorenzo, blank beneath the lenses, and bored. "Why would I need to teach him? He's more than capable of learning by observation when he chooses to."

"I'm missing why the fuck exactly anybody would want to act like you."

Sands raised his eyebrows part way, just enough to draw a big bold line round the recital of the obvious. "Because however often his crazy decisions might seem to deny it, El isn't just a fighter, he's a tactician. And for a tactician, there's really no such thing as having too many options." He dropped his cigarette end into his Coke can, sputtering hiss as it rolled in the last of the liquid, and quirked his lip at one edge. "Generally, El chooses methods that are a little more direct than mine, but both of us find it useful to have some level of skill with the other's talents."

El's natural conversational style hadn't altered any the last couple of years - a little more fluid when he used English, more of the casual and the colloquialisms sliding in, but still just El. When he wanted to, though, he could really rack up the balls, vocabulary expanded way beyond the standard tourist chatter of a mariachi.

Sands had wondered initially just what Lorenzo's story was, that this historically poverty-soaked Mexican spoke English like a native. A perpetually cursing trailer trash native, to be sure, but there were enough of those in Uncle Sam's back yard that the kid would blend right in.

He'd stopped wondering so hard right around the time he'd decided the kid was too simple to be any kind of challenge. He didn't care if Little Lori had grown up with some ex-pat grandpa or uncle instead of his crack whore mom, or whatever sob story had turned him into a teenaged killer. Though there could still be some benefit to knowing where someone's mental kinks lay, to poke at just for fun.

"You say all that, say it cuts both ways, but I've never seen you do anything but talk, send other people out to do the dirty work." The words weren't exactly placatory, but they came later, slower than the brat's usual elastic snap-back, some hint of thought crawling behind them.

Sands tipped his head a little, smiling with closed lips. "You will." Salinas wasn't going to be alone and he wasn't going to be easy, and that part of the plan would call on all of them.

He plugged his earphone into the laptop on the seat beside him and tapped at a couple of keys. He didn't have anything useful he hadn't gone over twenty times already, didn't have a detail in the files that wasn't duplicated in his head. But if it looked like he was working on something, at least the kid would shut up for the duration.

The engine turned and stuttered into barely-even revolutions, the seat shivering and settling beneath him, rattle of tappets high over the whine. Lorenzo pulled out into the buzzing flow of traffic and made the left two blocks on to head back to the apartment, all in silence.

Sands pushed his hand through his damply clinging hair, wiped at the sweat gathering round the plastic at his ear, and wondered how much longer it would be before the kid figured the fake-out. With careful, sparing application, he could probably string it to last until he got the fuck back out of Mexico.

He had the impression the next few days were really going to stretch the 'sparing' part.

They made it back to the apartment without the brat feeling the need to offer any more commentary, and the heavy Mexico traffic kept Lorenzo's driving within the tolerances of Sands' stomach. When he let himself in the door, the air flowed past him thick and tequila-sweet, Fideo already established in one of the chairs and starting on the celebratories. El was the slow, steady chopping from the kitchen, the rhythmic thunk of blade on wood, and Sands wandered through to lounge against the cupboards alongside him.

"You could've lost him at the end there."

"But I didn't." El talked down at the countertop, onion smell-sting rising thick over the even fall of the blade. Marriage to the hellion with the knife rep hadn't passed along many of her skills to El – he was no flash chef of the veggies, every slice measured and cautious.

Sands tipped his head and let his lips twitch at one corner. "Don't build him up so much in his own head next time, then you won't have to glare so hard."

"I've had more practice at glaring." Light, gentle humour lurking in the words, the simple, repetitive motions already draining El of any tension left from the meet. Sands wouldn't have to drag him to the bedroom and fuck him back down to ground level this time.

Pity – he could have used the de-stress workout himself.

The door rattled again with pressure and keys, slamming behind feet as the kid breezed in. "Nice job, El! You nailed that sucker right to the fucking wall."

El spared the onions for a second as he turned to smile at Sands. "See? Some people appreciate my efforts."

Sands flashed his eyebrows quick and high over the lenses. "But a reasoned critique is far more constructive."

The kid bounced to a stop in the kitchen doorway, all rustling shirt and squeaky shoes. "So what's next up?"

Sands shrugged. "We wait. Salinas bites or he doesn't, we can't change it now."

Sands hated waiting.

It had always been a big part of the job, but over the years he'd never gotten any better at it. It was there the whole time, nibbling along the edges of him, the urge, the temptation to nudge things along a little, that extra bit of fine tuning, because nothing could ever be perfect, right? There always had to be something more he could tweak, put that extra bit of pressure on to ease things his way. Why settle for ninety-three percent odds when he could notch it up to ninety-four?

But sometimes there really was nothing more to be done, sometimes all you could get from leaning was risk somebody noticing the extra weight and blasting the entire deal sixty feet high in a cloud of dust. And sometimes knowing that wasn't enough to keep Sands from leaning, because if everything came too easy, it just wasn't enough to keep him entertained.

This time, leaning wouldn't be a risk, it would be group suicide. This time he didn't dare stick his nose outside the goddamn door of the apartment without a reason that outweighed the disaster of his fucking photo plastered on the mark's walls.

This time he had to wait.

The waiting hadn't been much of an issue the last year or so. Mostly he was dancing around two or three deals at any one time, and waiting for the detail to drop on one just meant switching his attention to another. And then there was El, conveniently making the offer to distract for an hour or two, always there with hands reaching to run along his arm, his neck, at just the right time.

The timing of it was predictable, deliberate - El grew a little nervous when Sands got twitchy, and Sands liked it that way, the proof that El was still so fully aware of him, that trained concentration focussed tight over his skin the same way it had been those first few months.

Now El spent too much time lounging round the table with the sidekicks, and lazy afternoon fucks sprawled along the sofa weren't on the agenda.

Sands went over the files on Salinas, the details on the hotel, the room, the planned access and the timing. When the files weren't repeating slow and uneven in his ear, they ran through his thoughts, circling, tilting, every angle checked and rechecked, the patterns of it seared into his brain unrelenting, until he just wanted to scrub his head clean of every word and sleep.

Music couldn't empty his mind, the long, sweeping flow of classical unable to relax him, possibilities and probabilities forcing through the heavy, driving beat of dance and every variation between. Inactivity strung out the hours, days measured in the stretching gaps between meals, boredom the creeping threat that had stalked behind him his entire life - closer than ever now, bound in a world without light or colour or flashing movement, one less sense to process and distract.

The dipso didn't change, laughing along with the others or passed out in a corner as the moods and the booze hit him, and either way he wasn't hassling Sands. Even the kid had eased off, skipping past the gaping opportunities for cheap shots, aiming his chatter at the mariachis and leaving Sands' existence in the apartment unremarked.

Sands thought maybe El had warned him to sit and stay, or risk getting bit.

He slept a while at nights, after the sex, fast and intense to take the edge off, then slower and drawn-out. He woke in the early hours with the claws scratching endless in his head, wanting out, wanting loose to _act_, and he reached again for El, for the urge that burned all the others from his brain.

El didn't show any sign of tension through the waiting, not on the outside; he never had, his body innately restless and seeking of distraction and touch, with little room for change. But there was something ticking there inside him, something regular and even and ready, and he responded each time, alert and awake, never turning Sands away in sleep.

They waited three days before it rang, the new phone kept close in El's pocket, the one only Torres had the number for.

Chatter sliced short round the mariachi table at the distinctive ringtone, the flap of cards falling onto cheap wood, and Sands swung away from the laptop, head tilted to the open door between.

The bleeps cut off mid-note when El hit talk.

The Spanish was rapid at first, confident as El gave the hotel for the meet, let Salinas' guy offer a time. It was less than a minute before El's end of the chat turned stilted, lots of 'yes' and 'no' and 'I don't think –' with lengthening gaps between, and Sands started to get that slow crawl over his skin that he'd felt in Culiacán, and again in Saltillo with Honaker on their asses.

Sands was on his feet, idling in the doorway against the jamb when El finally agreed on eleven the next morning and flipped the cell closed. "You wanna tell us just how badly that went wrong?"

El laid the phone down on the table, muted click of plastic. "He won't use the hotel. He said it was his choice or no meet. I said yes."

"Christ, El, what d'you do a goddamn fucked-up thing like that for? We know shit about the place."

"If we backed out now, he'd know for certain. This is our only chance to get to him."

"Yeah, and now we've got less than twenty-four hours to make it work."

El's feet crossed the floor towards him, fingers resting light on his wrist. "Sometimes we only had seconds, and we made it work."

"Except it didn't work out too well that time I got shot," Sands snapped. Christ, he'd thought that incident was the end of the mass gun-slinging, he'd made goddamn sure to arrange it that way. At least until Honaker had crashed his party.

El's hand curled and tightened over his skin, a grip instead of a touch.

Fuck. It was already done, and the time they had was running. "So where's the new meet?"

"A place of his in Polanco. He didn't give me a description."

"Well, if you've got the cash, Polanco's the place to own property." Sands gave El a tight smile. "Did he at least give you an address, or is that to follow at a half hour's notice?"

"No, I've got the address." El was smiling soft in return, but the words lay muted over it.

"Get over there. Get a scope on that house, figure out everything you can from outside, but don't get close." Access to CIA databases and satellite images would have come in seriously useful about now, but El would pick out a couple of good rooftop vantage points.

"I'll go too. We can take different spots, get the info from different angles and work it faster." The kid's eagerness to finally be doing something after the wait waved like a goddamn flag.

"And twice the risk of being seen," Sands decided. "We don't chance it, El goes alone. But you can wait with the car, get him out quicker if there's a problem." And as a side benefit, it kept a tense, questioning brat out of Sands' space for the next couple of hours.

He turned back to El, still standing close, still a physical ring of pressure light on his arm. "Get what you can fast, then get out. If you stick around there too long, he'll know about it, and I need you back here early." The thoughts scrambled and split in his head, the rats freed and racing through the corridors, the maze of possibilities to be shaped and funnelled by whatever El found in Polanco.

He smiled wide with the scope of the choices, the people to find and tap in a single day. "We've got some shopping to do."


	7. Chapter 7

When El gave them the run-down on what he'd seen, they didn't really have a whole lot more.

Salinas had invited them along to one of the few big old private residences still standing in a district swallowed whole by corporate and condos. It was as isolated as a central neighbourhood got, which worked their way for making the hit and getting out with minimal fuss, but didn't exactly facilitate their entrance.

Sands twisted the last of his cigarette into the ashtray, the heavy, fresh stench of burning crushed away with the pressure. "We'll need to play this one on the subtle side. If we try and shoot our way in, Salinas won't stick around for us to kill."

"Whatever we try, it could still go wrong." El spoke quiet and level, flat fact in the face of a plan with too many unknowns. "We need somebody waiting at the front, with a car to chase down anyone who runs."

Sands twitched his lips, half-curled. "In particular the second car out, he's the type to send a sucker decoy first."

"Yeah, but he knows that too, he could bluff us out," the kid said. "If I thought El Mariachi was after me, I'd be in the 'decoy' car."

Sands tipped his head and considered. They could play 'if he knows that we know' all night and never get a solid answer. "If we attack the first car at the gate, the second gets a warning and battens down. So we cover the bases – two guns waiting at the front, one takes the first car out and rams it a quarter mile along the street. Whoever's left at the gate mops up anyone else trying to follow." That would neatly account for both the sidekicks, and keep the dipso well clear of any situations where he might get a bit too excited.

"Is there a way in to do this quietly?" Fideo asked, pulling neatly back to the idea of the hit as planned instead of the hit as it all went to hell.

"The road on the west side is tree-lined, that gives cover going over the wall." No hesitation, no decision to be made; most of El's surveillance time would have been concerned with getting himself inside. "It won't be easy, but it can be done."

"Then I guess the choices are pretty much made for us." More rustles from Lorenzo, wriggling around again, sprawled across the floor. Until he met the kid, Sands had always thought El was the pinnacle of constant motion. "The two of us outside while El goes in to make the hit."

"And me," Sands added. He wasn't gonna sit in a fucking room and smoke waiting for everything to happen without him, not this time. Setting the pieces up and sitting back while the game played itself out didn't have quite the same appeal when he had a personal investment in there.

"It won't work." El turned to face Sands, voice soft and unwavering. "We don't know anything about the layout."

"That's fine, I'll just follow you."

El shook his head. "One man is less noticeable than two, easier to find a place to hide if I need to."

Sands' face smoothed out blank, the stiffness drawling through in his words. "That's been true all along, El. It never bothered you before."

"It didn't matter before. This plan depends too much on secrecy, we all agreed on how to get it done." El lightened his voice, the familiar hint of humour creeping in. "Besides, I need you to cover the one gate at the back. Unless he tries climbing his own walls, that's the only other way out."

Give El a little warning, and too often he'd track down some unshakeable logic why things should happen his way. Not one of Sands' favourite things about the man, but it was better than the alternative of working with an idiot. "He's fat and fifty," Sands pointed out. "I think we can discount the walls."

"I'll take the back entrance." Lorenzo turned to aim his words direct to El, the standard Sands-avoidance pattern of the last few days. "He can wait out front with Fideo."

"I can't drive," Sands said, flat. "And if a car gets through that gate and into traffic, I won't know which one to shoot."

"You can't leave him back there on his own, El, he'll shoot the fucking gardener."

Sands uncrossed his feet, tipped his head towards the brat's patch of floor. "Salinas is jumpy about this already, he's hardly likely to have his family stashed in there." He drawled the words slow and deliberate, and unlike the brat, he wasn't going to route his criticisms through a third party. "Everybody in that place is going to be a shooter, and everybody's a target. Nail that to your skull before we go near it."

"The footpath meets the gate on the west side, where the trees are," El said. "You and Fideo will be less obvious at the front where it's open, Sands needs to stay out of clear sight." Sands let his lips curl faint at the edges - El was getting real smart at finding ways to agree with Sands without directly taking sides against the kid.

And unlike the brat, Sands was sharp enough to spot it when it ran the other way.

"What if nobody goes to the cars?" Fideo asked. "If you hold them in the house, how long before we come in?"

Sands reached down to tap lightly at the bag on the floor, tucked up tight alongside the sofa. "One of the reasons I went shopping today was to pick up some better comms – a little more visible to wear, but we'll have clear signals for well over a mile, even allowing for a few walls in the way." He might be stuck hanging around outside for this one, but he wasn't going to be waiting and _wondering_. It really wasn't his natural role.

"When Salinas is dead, or you tell me he's outside, I'll take the back way out, pick up Sands and the car there." El's hand slid to the sofa between them, the edge of a finger brushing over the denim at Sands' thigh. "Fideo and Lorenzo leave in the car that wasn't a battering ram."

"Hey, but what if the guy isn't even in there? We're working this whole thing round the idea that we're hunting a sitting target, when he could be waiting for El to get all cozy on the sofa with the guns inside before he even shows up."

The kid did at least get there, in the end, even if he tended to be a little late – Sands had dismissed that possibility early in the afternoon. "That leaves the opportunity for someone to set up an outside ambush, exactly the circumstances in which Ayala was taken down. Salinas will be keen to avoid that. This meet's scheduled for late morning to give him plenty of time to get safely holed away inside – maybe earlier in the day, or maybe he'll have spent the night in there. Nobody's going to plan an assault with a twelve hour window." Not even El, not if it involved sitting outside a guy's property with no clue which direction he was headed from and no hope of staying inconspicuous.

"I guess that covers most of the options," Lorenzo said eventually. "Just as long as nobody pulls any funny shit."

Sands had no doubt the last part was aimed exclusively at him, but he smiled down towards Lorenzo, benign. "We're leaving you to take charge of your inebriate friend on that front."

Quick, shifting movement from the floor, but El leaned forward in his seat, dropping his elbows to his knees, and the brat offered no further commentary.

The conversation dragged on a while longer after that, details poked at, possibilities tossed back and forth, but there were just too many gaping holes in what they knew to pin down anything outside of the basics. The inside of the house was pure 'here be dragons' territory, and there were a whole lot of cracks in the plan that relied on El's ability to improvise to pour the concrete filler in.

When Sands grew bored of talking in circles and headed for the bedroom, El followed him with reaching hands and eager lips, though he wasn't hard.

Well, not at first.

The blow job was enjoyable enough, a whole spiral staircase up from the rest of the evening. It never really lost its edge, having El crouch before him, hot mouth and taut tongue working over his cock, swirling and licking to get Sands off.

It wasn't hard to make someone suck him off. Man or woman, it was all the same, anybody would do it, with the judicious application of pressure from just the right angle. But to make El Mariachi _want_ to suck him off - to have the man drop to his knees with a smile and soft words, fingers tugging fast and light at Sands' fly - well, that was an achievement Sands counted as a personal special.

Orgasm was good, coming pretty much right when he would've finished it himself, and it was pleasant enough to reciprocate the favour with his hand, but it didn't dope Sands out of existence the way he'd come to expect. The sheets lay sticky over the sweat on his skin, and damp with come at his hip, unless he curled to avoid it.

Alongside him, El wriggled and twisted even more than he usually did, and Sands figured neither of them was pinning down too much sleep.

He dozed in bizarre snatches of half-dream, of creeping, screaming memory and distorted predictions, so many twisted variations on the day's plan, all getting fucked over by the horror of past reality.

It was almost a relief to feel the morning, to find El kneeling across the room in a stream of fast, quiet Spanish, but Sands felt like a mangy mutt waking up to find its balls chopped off, and his brain needed a total hard drive purge and a restart without the worms.

El's presence around him was low sound and movement, a couple of quick touches, and Sands wasn't in a mood to make chit-chat either. The shower washed some of the sewage from his skull, along with the coffee El brought him, a thick tang sweet and rich in his throat when he stepped from the bathroom.

He sat cross-legged on the bed with El beside him, slide-and-click, slide-and-click, the easy, natural monotony of stacking rounds into clips – a hell of a lot more of El's than his own, since El never had adopted the habit of preserving ammo.

As the haze cleared from his head, the tension was right there to fill the spaces.

Slide-and-click, slide-and-click.

Whenever Sands needed a mental distraction, the easiest way was to find the brat.

"What the fuck are you doing? You look like the gringo from hell, and that moustache yells out fake half way down the goddamn street."

"Exactly." Sands hooked a spare clip onto his belt, hidden under the loose tails of what El assured him was the most hideous Hawaiian-style shirt on sale in Mexico City. He angled his face towards the kid and quirked his lip. "These people know who I am, and what I am. If I'm going to disguise myself, I wouldn't do it like this, would I?"

The kid didn't answer right away, and when he did, his words were aimed over Sands' shoulder, to El. "Does that shit actually work?"

"I don't know. He never tried to hide himself from me." El stepped around in front of Sands, studying. "It would work on people who don't really look."

Lorenzo sniffed in air, fast and high. "Everybody's gonna be staring at that get-up."

"Sure they look, an' then they all look right away again an' laugh," Sands drawled in heavy Texan. His southern accent was about as convincing as his Spanish, but he wasn't assuming too many Mexicans would be able to tell the difference. He reached for the big Olympus on the table and hung it round his neck. "Just another crazy tourist. Plenty of them in Polanco."

"Well, you got the crazy part nailed," Lorenzo not-quite-muttered as he turned away, and Sands smiled, dry. The kid was so much more entertaining when he took the bait.

Fideo was the last one to show in the living room, predictably, another fast round of weapon checks and ammo counts clicking a background to Sands' second coffee. The brat left first, taking the Metro a couple of districts over to select and appropriate the third car – another hangover talent from his charming teenage years. If they were going to be leaving a head-on wreck at the scene, it wouldn't be a wreck that could be tied to them.

Sands made it through another coffee and two smokes before it was time to go.

El turned down the smokes when Sands offered.

Sands settled himself into the car, El's seatbelt clicking into place alongside him – it wouldn't go too well if they were pulled over for a violation on the way. Bad enough they had to risk the dipso at the wheel for this one.

Sands hooked the radio into his ear and flipped on the mike. "This good?"

"Fine from here." Fideo's voice was clear and precise from the second car. "El?"

"I hear you."

"Okay."

El fired up the engine at Fideo's confirmation and pulled out.

The traffic was heavy, like it was ever anything else in Mexico City, but the worst of the morning crawl had cleared, and they'd timed the run well. Lorenzo hit the comms a couple of minutes from target, parked back along the street a ways in his acquired ride. The signal held some hiss for the kid's check, but they'd be pushing the range through the high rises.

El took a left from the arterial, swinging back north into Polanco's residential streets. The traffic load lifted as they weaved in on the address, leaving a hum settled low at the back of Sands' head.

Another turn, a slow, sharp right, and the hum was _there_, shattering into jagged frequencies, and it wasn't any part of him. The crackling at his ear was rising, fast, a mass of static hissed into his head, and Sands' muscles drew taut round his bones with the knowledge. "Stop."

El braked instantly, swinging the car over to the kerb.

The wait was only moments before the kid's voice echoed through, cracked and krazy-glued under the buzz, but still there. For now. "Hey, I'm getting all kinds of crap on this line - this earpiece I've got's a piece of shit."

Sands held himself entirely still, head pressed back to the seat, resisting the urge to shake it, pointless. "It's Salinas. He's figured out someone must've used comms to coordinate the move on Ayala. He's covering himself, blocking local transmissions."

It was back with him, and stronger, the crawling sensation hooked deep through his flesh, the knowledge that he'd lost his hold on the strings. The control all ripping away from him, another Culiacán, another Day of the Dead, and it was time to call this off, to bail and get out, _now_.

El breathed alongside him, waiting, fingers tapping light on the plastic of the wheel, otherwise still.

El wouldn't stop. There wouldn't be another chance, and El would take it on, with the odds slimming around him, walls closing to confine and trap; and Sands could walk away and shrink them tighter, and El still wouldn't back out.

Sands drew in breath deep and slow through his nose, stretching out the muscles between his ribs, prying apart the pressure inside that wanted to be small and tight and curled. "It'll get worse as we get closer. I guess we'll be making this deal without the chit-chat." He switched off his own transmitter, reached across and did the same to El's. "How long for you to check most of the house?"

El shrugged. "That depends how many people get in my way. Maybe twenty minutes from when I go in."

Sands ran his fingers over the face of the watch in his pocket, flicked the channel back open. "Nothing changes, you wait at the front just in case, like we said. We'll be in the area at 10.20, but that's a little early to be polite – we won't go in till 10.45." The sidekicks should catch on to the twenty-five minute deadline, and anyone who might be listening in wouldn't be expecting them any sooner.

"If I get out faster than we think, I'll bring the car round the front of the house before we head back," El added. "Watch for it."

"Hell, we — just use the phones. We've all got them." Lorenzo's voice hopped and broke through the static.

"If we use the cells while the operator's around, he'll just switch frequencies, jam those too." Sands twitched his lips, sent humour curling into the words for the benefit of potential third parties. "Salinas must've been pissing off some of the neighbours around that place."

"He's not gonna be — if he's been fucking with — phones for weeks."

"It won't be full time, only when the man himself is at the office. Which makes it fortunate he uses so many different ones." Sands flipped his tones into mildly irritated boredom. "This interference is just gonna piss us off. Switch off and lose them." He didn't want a hunk of dead plastic blocking his ear, and it would be one less chance of an untimely ID without them.

El clicked the car into drive, engine note rising smooth as they moved off.

Sands' fingers ran along his belt, over Sigs and clips checked and rechecked an hour before, and he forced them down to splay still across the denim at his thigh. "The back-up's on a timer now, so don't go crazy inside – none of that showy shit you like so much."

El only shrugged alongside him. "I did this without back-up for years."

Sands twisted in his seat, aiming the dark lens stare. "And if you find anything that looks like a jammer, take it out."

The car slowed fractionally, El's head swinging round to Sands. "How would I know it?"

"It'll be hooked to a computer to check sources, pick out the right frequency to spike."

"That might not help too much." El's inflection bounced exaggerated, and Sands smiled. Salinas wasn't gonna be running a low-tech set-up in there.

"Just shoot everything. You're good at it."

El's head flicked to Sands again, smiling light through his words. "I'm supposed to be quiet this time, remember?"

Sands dipped his chin faintly, lifting his eyebrows high above his shades. "So shoot everybody first, and then start on the inanimate objects."

One of those quick, brushing touches at Sands' hip, and El's humour had fallen away. "When they're all dead, I just want to leave."

Yeah, and Sands shared the goddamn sentiment, and then some. Everything in Sands' head and his gut both was telling him to get the fuck out right now, while they could.

The ridged weave of denim pressed tight against his palms.

Two more turns, and El stopped, backed the car into a parking spot and killed the engine. "The house is the next block." El's door clicked open, tap of boots on pavement.

Sands shrugged out of the jacket that was masking the Hawaiian monstrosity, hooking it over onto the back seat. The camera looped across his shoulder, and he was all set to play.

El headed off along the street, Sands slotting into place behind him, sidewalk transitioning to the deadened tap of road surface and back to sidewalk beneath his feet. He hitched his camera strap higher on his shoulder a couple of times, arm swinging out to place the rough brush of stone over his knuckles.

"Here." El stopped, turned, and Sands leaned back on one elbow against the wall alongside him, surface coarse and cool through the thin cotton of his shirt, no morning sun here on the west side. Leaves rustled above and both ways along the street as the breeze swirled past the wall, the reason El had chosen this spot to go over. "The gate is another twenty metres along this wall."

Sands raised the big Olympus to his face, angling it along the street low, past where the trees' trunks would be. Polanco was Mexico's latest Hip Central, with a few architectural hangovers like Salinas' place, and wherever the hell he pointed a lens, there'd be something somebody would want to shoot. They were off of the arterials here, but the grid layout gave the streets some rat run potential, and cars went buzzing past maybe a couple a minute.

He slouched with fingers shoved into his pocket between photographic interludes, tracking the minutes over the face of his watch.

He didn't say anything when it closed on 10.19. El would know well enough for himself.

El took a step away from the wall, standing close against Sands. "This one."

The rumble of the passing car peaked and paled, heading away, and Sands bent to hook his hands together, boosting up at the press of El's boot to send him light over the wall. A soft rustle and slither from the far side, more leaves than heavy weight, and El faded out of his perception.

Flash of him forty seconds later in the three quick silenced rounds, a leafy brush instead of a thud as El grabbed the dead meat and lowered it slow.

Quiet was going to plan, so far.

Another couple of minutes brushed past Sands' fingers with no more sound from El, and by now he'd be far enough out that there wouldn't be.

Sands started to move in the direction of the gate, slow, very slow without a guide for his steps. Fingers lifted in a rectangle before him as he stopped, swung back around, a tourist casual and easily distracted while his feet found the ridges in the sidewalk, the broken lines where tree roots invaded. Holding the photographer image with the big Olympus still tucked tidily away behind his elbow, so much easier to reach for a Sig without a camera strap snagging at his arm. Quick brush of the wall, the position check as he turned back down the street, meandering forward, lazy, no real purpose.

It was obvious enough when he found the gate, hand stretching out further on the wall check, back into air and the twisting curves of metal. It was shut, which was nice to know. That would give Sands a useful extra couple of seconds while it was opened, and swinging metal hinges would tip him off that someone was leaving, no matter how stealthy they tried to be in the footsteps department.

No pause, no stop, just a guy wandering by, fingers squared ahead of him to point along the street. He sank against the wall again some thirty feet beyond the gate, his back to the house and too far to be sneaking even a slice angle view past the metal, nothing to drag suspecting eyes his way.

The cars hummed by in irregular patterns, waves of air forced over his skin and rippling the tail of his shirt. Sands turned his head to visibly follow one along the street now and then, his attention all strung back over his shoulder, beyond the wall.

Leaves rustled overhead and behind, shivering waves of sound rising with the wisps of hair teasing along his cheeks. He reached up to brush away a strand that tickled idly under his nose, catching on the outsized moustache. An insect darted in, close, dodging away at the last second, sharp flash-buzz past his ear.

Sweat gathered round the straps holding the Berettas high under his arms, undershirt clinging damp and goddamn itchy in wrinkles round the leather. He wasn't even going to want the fucking things, emergency use only, no way to hide the extra length of the silencers under the tourist shirt.

Quiet was good. Quiet meant everything was falling in line with the plan.

He still wished he knew just what the fuck was going on in there.

He lit himself a cigarette he didn't really need, but it made a nice stage prop for a visitor relaxed against a wall, taking in the atmosphere of a just-off-the-track Mexican street.

Quiet was drop-kicked hard in the long, slow shriek of abused tyres and an abrupt, very metallic smack and crunch. Distinct, but not ear-shattering, dulled by distance, everything happening a few blocks over the other side of the house.

Somebody had decided inside was a little too unsafe for them.

His fingers brushed over his watch – seven minutes since El left.

He hoped the kid hadn't wrecked too sweet a ride.

No audible gunfire from out front, which was a plus – the sidekicks had silencers, and maybe Salinas' people wouldn't be worrying about staying discreet for the neighbours right now.

Sands flicked the rest of his smoke out into the street, to be crushed by the cars. Edged back along the wall a ways, closer to the gate, because the people inside must be getting a pretty good idea of who was around by now. The crazy tourist was gonna get tagged soon, wherever he was standing.

He stopped maybe ten feet from the gate, propping himself relaxed against the stone. Still nothing from the other side of the wall but plants and bugs.

He was reaching so hard to hear the whispers, it felt like his fucking ears were being squeezed when it started, even dimmed by the passage through stone. No build-up, no slide in, just multiple weapons opened up, north end of the house – at least one auto in there, tight rippling bursts above the short groupings of the semis, too many, too overlapping, too broken up to count.

Distinctive blast of the shotgun, one barrel, the next a half a second later.

Sands' fingers had wrapped themselves around the grip of a Sig beneath his shirt tails, dimpled plastic pressed into the damp of his skin.

A drawn-out fucking gun battle with numbers had never been any part of the plan. If El had used a decent pump-action, the Remington or the Mossberg, he'd still have at least a couple of rounds in there.

The auto had fallen out of the symphony – empty, or dropped by a corpse. No other weapon jumped in to replace it, so Sands went with the corpse.

Two more shotgun shells, two more blasts from El, two more that said the corpse this time was a richly deserving motherfucker.

The gunfire was easing back, less from the semi-autos now, shorter bursts, breaks between – shots fired from cover, preserving ammo.

And then nothing – maybe a minute for the whole gig, max.

The quiet stretched out again, into insects and leaves and a passing car. No feet from inside, nobody in any particular hurry to leave, at least not by this door.

If Salinas was dead, El should be headed back here, all set to chauffeur Sands' taxi to the apartment.

If Salinas was still alive, as Mr Self-Preservation he should be getting the hell out, but nobody was shooting out front.

Unless Salinas was alive and he knew there wasn't a threat any more, in which case he'd stay safely tucked away inside.

Maybe, when whatever version of shit had sprayed off of the blades, El had gotten out the closest way he could find. And whatever door, window or rooftop ledge he'd used could've been nearer the front of the house, with no sane way through.

El could be circling back around the streets right now to come pick up Sands.

Sands liked that version, but he had to admit it wasn't very El – once the shooting started and secrecy had its brains splattered all over the walls, El would most likely take the insane route through the middle. Nothing that would give a target time to sneak away ahead of him.

The minutes brushed by beneath Sands' fingers, three of them now since the gunfire stopped. And he was left standing here with no fucking clue whether El was a hundred yards out and gaining fast, or sprawled out dead somewhere inside. Nothing even close to a sure winner to choose, and both of them equally likely to throw him flat on his ass if he jumped on board the wrong horse.

Christ. He hated this fucking miserable country and the way it did this to him every goddamn time. Always trying to figure out which choice of disaster would trample him down into the dirt with the least hoofprints over his spine.

The breeze twisted over the wall and hooked cool around his neck, strands of hair drifting forward to catch in the sweat along his jaw. He wished he could just tie the whole lot back out of his fucking face.

The stone pricked across his shoulder blades through the thin cotton of his shirt.

Screw it. Mexico was a complete fucking cunt, and she'd fucked him over once and he wasn't gonna stand around here, hand her a twelve inch dildo, and wait for her to fuck him again.

He elbowed the camera further behind his hip, out of his way, and finished the creep back towards the gate – slow, cautious, and not just because he was listening for trouble. The rough brush of the wall dropped away from his skin; on past the break for the gateway, picking up stone again the far side, almost skinning his goddamn knuckles on the edge.

Sidewalk tapping away beneath his feet, finding and matching any unevenness with his memory as a double check on distance. Absolutely no rush, no extra stretch to the stride, steps steady and natural and measured, fingers at his hip brushing light along the wall, counting back towards the intersection, back to the car.

Toes at the kerb, over the cross street and up onto sidewalk, cars buzzing past unconcerned just the way they'd been doing all morning. Tap, tap, tap, the rhythm of his feet on the concrete and the numbers in his head, closer, close, reaching roadside to find steel and his hand going to the keys in his pocket.

He'd never actually used his set since they were cut. Maybe he should have checked the fucking things worked.

Metal slid and clicked easily in metal, turning with only a slight jiggle, and he popped the trunk open. He pulled his cane from the straps securing it to the side and tucked it under his arm, tossing the Olympus back into the depths. The tourist photographer thing wasn't gonna hold up too well once he started tapping his way around.

He pulled on his gloves, leather sliding smooth over his knuckles, then locked the car again before he left it – an old Chevy wasn't a likely thief magnet in Polanco, but he definitely wanted it to be there when he came back.

He counted his way steadily back to the intersection and on along the wall. He wasn't spending any longer than he had to walking around Mexican streets looking obviously blind - no point reeling in more trouble than they already had.

The numbers gave him the spot where El had gone over, confirmation in the same dense brush of leaves overhead and behind the wall. Beyond it stretched the space barely known, where he'd edged, cautious and intermittent, no count for his natural stride.

He swung the cane down from under his arm into his left hand. Okay. Now he could hitch up the pace a little.

El had said another sixty feet to the gate, give or take, Sands judging it in the smooth, even swing of the cane over the sidewalk, touching light at the base of the wall with every arc to the right. Until the cane found space, and he flicked upwards to tap gently onto metal.

He found hinges on the right hand edge, drifted fingers across to the latch. He half thought he'd find a lock and have to go for a climb, but the gate swung inwards and he slipped through, leaving it fully open behind him in case he wanted a fast exit. It was hardly a secret now that somebody had gone walkabout inside.

Out of full public view, his hand dropped automatically to the silenced Sig at his belt, then pulled back; he undid a couple of buttons on his shirt, reaching through to pull a Beretta from under his arm. The auto pistol wasn't exactly subtle, but subtle had already been raped three times and dumped in a garbage bag in an alleyway.

He followed the stone path towards the house, regular blocks even under his feet, cane poking into something softer, grittier, when he swung it wide. He stayed with his smooth, fast pace, disrupted only when something straggly snagged at his cane. He wasn't expecting to find anybody out here – the gunfire had all been inside the house, and anyone who was headed away from it would've headed right the hell away, not stopped to admire the flower beds.

The path stayed straight till he hit the side of the house.

The door wasn't locked. Sands suspected that had more to do with El than an innate lack of security.

He pulled the door open, wide, fast, stepping back against the wall with the Beretta up –

Nobody shot at him, which was always a good thing, but especially now when he was kind of distracted by the clutching spasms crawling in his throat as he sucked in air.

He'd conveniently managed to forget, over the last year and some, just how fucking bad the stink got in these abattoirs of El's.

It wasn't just the blood, though enough of that in a tight space had a thick, edged scent that caught unpleasantly at the back of his tongue. It was all the other crap that leaked from corpses, from just about every orifice, in every state of matter – liquid, solid, gas, it was all in there, and desperate to crawl up his goddamn nose.

Leaving the door open served a nice dual purpose – this place was in serious need of some ventilation.

He poked around the nearby floor, finding the two bodies sprawled along the hallway, testing carefully for any slickness beneath his shoes. Moved off towards the north side of the house, tapping slower now, lighter over the smooth, perfect tiles, head swinging to catch the angles on any sounds. He knew something of the basic layout of this place from El's report on it - Mission Revival, the trend of the moment when this whole district had first gone up in the thirties, all squares round central courtyards.

Sands didn't give a damn about courtyards and colonnades – Salinas wouldn't have been outside taking the air.

He ignored the first rooms he passed. El had been inside a while before anyone shot at him, he'd have gotten a lot further than the door.

Sands found another body just around the first bend in the hallway, at the start of the long sweep east. This one was a short fuck with a paunch.

He hoped like hell that El was awake in here someplace, because otherwise he'd have to search this entire fucking mansion kicking every sprawled shape with his toe-cap till he found the one with guns in all the right places.

He could just dial El's cell and follow the buzz, but that risked attracting the attention of anyone else who might still be alive, and he didn't want anyone else taking a closer look at El first.

He stayed with the outside wall, keeping the impenetrable solidity of it at his back, poking across the hallway for doorways and layout. The house oozed the night's lingering cool from the stone, no sun yet through the north side windows, and well insulated. Sands' undershirt clung damp across the skin of his back and shoulders, and stickiness gathered in a line at the waistband of his jeans.

Some half way along the second 'wing', he started taking more of an interest in the rooms off the hall.

Exploring was considerably more of a pain in the ass with furniture getting in on the act. Sands circled the walls of each room as close as he could, cane sweeping wide around him in deep arcs. Couple of times he found corpses; mostly he found rugs and chair legs, snagging his cane with deep wooden whacks that carried a lot further than he would have liked.

Creeping out of the rooms he'd tap-tap-tapped around, back into the hallway - well, that really took the fun to new heights. Edging up along the frame, gun around first, ready to send a burst at any mulefucker who thought to take a pot shot at his hand –

Movement off to his left, back the way he came, and low - he whipped the Beretta across his body to send two bursts its way, and it stopped.

Maybe he just shot the cat.

Whatever it was, it definitely wasn't a threat now, and that was good enough for him.

Of course everybody left alive in the entire goddamn house knew where he was now too, but he'd slap those gnats when they showed up.

Back to the wall again, moving on to the next room, rhythmic flick of the wrist testing ahead for the doorway.

More movement, coming up from behind, and this time it definitely wasn't a fucking cat – some fucker trying to creep up on him in soft-soled tennis shoes that squeaked like a sewer full of rats.

He slipped back into that last doorway, just inside, to wait. Wait while the squeaky-squeaky made it around that last bend, let him close in, let him get confident, then stick the Beretta out and hose the fucking hallway with four quick bursts. One soft, slow thump under the bullets.

Sands pulled his hand back fast, but nobody returned fire.

He stuck the cane out first, and everything stayed quiet.

Edging out, delicate, easy, then back to the wall and feeling his way along again, towards the next door.

"Sands."

The voice was quiet, and not close, not direct, some muffling of walls between. He stopped, instant, still, angled his head towards where he thought....

"Sands." No question in El's words, absolute certainty of who was there, and Sands didn't find many opportunities to be positive about the fact that he had to tap his way through the world with a fucking cane, might as well take what he could get.

"Keep talking." Easier to follow sound past barriers when it was constant, not a game for guessing.

"Off the hallway. Right side. Past the table." Stripped phrases with gaps for quick, laboured breaths, but El was with it enough to be getting out the relevant info. Tapping forwards faster now because if anybody was out that way they'd have shot El already, hallway bending left round a corner of that courtyard, following the right hand wall past doorways till he struck wood, light and delicate, the leg of a too-fussy little telephone table or some such shit.

"In here." Sweeping strokes past the table to the doorway, unsurprised to find the tight confining echoes of what was more like a big cupboard than a small room, because El had gotten himself tucked away inside someplace where he only had the one approach to worry about.

El's voice had come from down low - not flat on the floor height, but he wasn't on his feet.

No time to use his hands, find out for himself. "Where?" he demanded, and El answered right away, but his voice faded out into a hiss.

"Ribs, low on the right."

Which ran the possibilities through as lungs, liver, diaphragm, maybe guts or stomach depending on the angle of entry. Not a great set of choices, but El had been shot full in the chest before and lived through it, no reason to suppose he'd be cashing in early for anything less.

Sands didn't ask any more. If there was anything important like he was hosing from an arterial bleed, El would get around to mentioning it. "We need to wrap it."

"I already did. I just didn't feel up to taking a stroll."

"Or making a phone call," Sands said, dry. He holstered the Beretta and grabbed a hold of El's left arm, bending low to pull it round over his shoulders. "Now get on your goddamn feet." Messy taps and scrabbling slide of boots as Sands hauled upwards, weight _lurching _uneven onto his neck, dragging him down and sideways, and for a second he thought he was going to drop the bastard. But El got his feet under him, got them into some sort of balance, with El wedged between Sands and the wall.

"I don't think I was awake to call," El said when his rasping lungs had regained something like rhythm. "I tied the bandage, and then I heard you."

"Nothing like a few bursts from an auto to wake a guy up." It was all too likely El would have passed out, between the shock and the blood pressure drop and the fact that pulling down tight would have hurt like a fucking bitch.

Low, fast clicks from El now, the familiar tap of cell phone keys. The sidekicks, presumably, and Sands didn't ask what he planned to say.

A single bleep from El's phone and he slipped it back into his pocket. "Give me a gun."

"Fuck a gun, just keep pressing on that hole."

"Left hand."

Sands reached around El's hip to find a holster that still held a Glock, slapped the butt against the hand draped over his shoulder. "You fire that thing, it better be because we're about to fucking die." Losing an eardrum, even on a temporary basis, wasn't anywhere on his list of Things To Do, and he wasn't wholly in favour of taking a .45 casing to the face either. Even if he didn't have to worry about his eyes.

He wiped his cane over thoroughly and tossed it away some place he wasn't going. He needed one and a half hands for El and what was left over for a weapon, and getting out of here was gonna be a complete bitch.

Beretta back in his right hand, wrapped around El and hugged tight to his hip, left hand gripping El's wrist at his shoulder. "Get moving."

Another lurch, and more weight dragging at him as they moved back from the wall; deep, heaving breaths from El close on his neck, but they were making progress in something close to a rhythm, the tap of El's boots almost regular with little slur or catch as they turned into the hallway.

"The front door's closer." El was moving with him physically, but the goddamn Mariachi still had to fucking _argue_.

"This way's clear." He knew where to find the door he'd come in by, and he wasn't going to consider El an entirely reliable source of details right now.

No cane to guide him, but he'd kept the count automatically on the way in, knew where the doors and the bodies were - if this broken, shuffling gait didn't screw with his calculations too much.

Christ.

"I got him." El's words jolted short, close at his neck. "Salinas. He's dead."

Like Sands gave a flying fuck either way. Salinas had never been their problem, and El wasn't gonna be doing any favours for anybody for a while, no matter how big-eyed the kid got when he put the pressure on.

His silence didn't discourage El any. "Torres too. They're both gone."

Now _that_ was relevant. Couldn't leave people walking around who'd gotten a good long look at El Mariachi, even if they only figured that part after the fact. "Good. Now shut the fuck up, unless you've got something to say that helps get us out of here."

"Something like, 'Don't fall over the body a metre in front of you'?"

That agreed with Sands' ongoing count, the skinny guy just before the hallway took a turn to the right. "We already met."

Two more steps and he lifted his toe forward slow to poke at solid, fleshy obstacle. The body was angled along the hallway, feet on the right the most convenient part to step over. He eased round sideways, tugging El after him; weight sawed across his shoulders uneven as El's boots slurred and stumbled, breath rasping rough and broken and warm on Sands' shoulder through the shirt.

"I don't think I'll be helping much longer."

Sands curled his fingers deep into the muscle of El's arm, felt the press onto bone beneath his glove. "Oh no you don't, you miserable Mexican piece of camel cud. You pass out on me, I'll drop you right where we stand and I'm leaving, got it? I'm not gonna drag your ass out of here."

Christ, he wasn't even sure he could. El was close enough the same height, but he was built bigger, and Sands had tried to keep himself tight but he knew he'd lost muscle. Running two to five a day was an option that had disappeared right along with his eyeballs, not to mention the effects of various bullets in his legs, and there was always that little stint of chain-smoking he'd indulged in. Once he started tripping over shit and fell flat on his face, he'd never get El hauled upright again.

"I wish I got to make the choice." El was breathing hard through every word, but there was something like a smile there below it.

"Shut up and press harder." He eased back his grip on El's arm before his fingers cramped up. If the pain of a fucking bullet wound wouldn't keep El awake, Sands digging his nails in him wasn't gonna make a goddamn difference. "And walk faster."

They couldn't have much time left. The police in Cash Cow Central wouldn't be the slowest or the stupidest, and probably they'd be here already if Salinas hadn't paid them to maintain a certain amount of discretion over anything that happened round his properties.

El finally did as he was goddamn told for the keeping quiet part, or as quiet as a guy could be who was heaving breath in and out with the force to feed a blast furnace. It was the walking faster part that wasn't coming off, the dragging slide of El's boots grating through Sands' head with each jerking step.

El wasn't talking, but it was unmissable as a lightning strike the instant he passed out.

The bellows snapped silent alongside Sands' ear, and another two fucking tons slung itself into place over his shoulders, his knees sagging and steps faltering under the stress. He let go his grip on El's wrist, making a grab for the Glock before it slid loose to the floor, because it sure as fuck wouldn't have the safety on.

His thumb found the catch and flipped it as he slipped the gun into his pocket, and he reached up to grab a hold of El's wrist again just before the arm slithered from round his neck.

It was a few more seconds before he could be sure he wasn't gonna go sprawling or drop the fucking mariachi.

El's weight dragged down the whole right side of his body, sucking from him any sort of balance. El's boots trailed and tripped at his own as he shuffled forwards. His count was fucked all to hell now, every step a slow edging of sole paper-thin above the tile, his left elbow brushing the wall to keep him straight, stop the pull from spinning him like a curve ball.

El was still breathing, lighter, shallower, faster now at Sands' shoulder, which was good if it meant most of that heaving for air had been the pain, and not a lung full of blood.

There was another bend ahead here somewhere, that last ninety degree before the thirty foot run to the door.

Then he'd have to cross the garden, and drag El a block along the street, to the car he couldn't drive.

Right now, toeing his way pathetically down the out-sized hallways of some Mission monstrosity, he'd be grateful enough for the fucking door.

Sound, right on the edge of his perception, and he shoved El and himself up against the wall, frozen.

Feet, more than one person, back along the hallway, back the way they'd come. Getting closer, following, that careful compromise gait between quiet and quick.

And maybe he would have been good in that mass gunfight after all, because he wasn't about to shoot the owners of these feet right now. Sands was fairly sure there weren't going to be too many situations where he'd mark it a plus to meet up with the sidekicks, but this definitely racked the count up to one. He twisted his head around back over his shoulder, trying not to eat a mouthful of El's shirt. "Get over here, you're late."

Feet coming faster, surer, a smooth almost-run echoing sharp through the corridors, and the kid slid to a stop right up in his face. "Jesus, what the fuck happened?"

"Chat later, grab his other arm and get out."

For once, the brat didn't argue, some of the weight tugged from Sands' shoulders and the drag easing off as Lorenzo lifted from the other side. And Christ, his spine really fucking appreciated that.

"The door's past that next left, then it's a straight run to the gate."

"I'll check it out." Fideo peeled away, soles padding fast and smooth, the sound dropping off dull as he put wall between them.

El's body lurched and shifted at Sands' neck, a sharp, hitching rustle from the kid. "Take his leg."

Sands would clarify his position on taking orders from the brat later - for now, it was easier to carry El between them than have his feet dragging behind, boot tips snagging on the corpses.

He shoved the Beretta back in the holster under his shirt, hooked his arm behind El's thigh and lifted, El hanging, swaying between them, as they took the first steps.

The dipso had better be on the fucking ball, because the kid wouldn't be in any respectable position to shoot anybody either.

They found the bend in the hallway, the kid tugging sideways, dragging him round the turn. One more landmark down as Sands adjusted to the pull in a couple of unbalanced steps, though he would have preferred it if his escort had said something first instead of yanking on him.

With their rustling, tapping movements to bury sound, without El's face draped over his neck in waves of warmth, Sands didn't know if El was still breathing or if they were dragging a dead man out of here.

He'd just assume El was still hanging on in there so long as the kid wasn't swearing and freaking.

The air was shifting around him with more than their movement now, a flow tugging and drifting over his cheek. They had to be close.

"Two dead guys coming up, in front of the door." Too imprecise, not the level of detail Sands could use, but at least the kid was kicking up his brain and making the effort. Sands knew how they were arranged from finding them on the way in, so once he got a toe at the first leg, he was good with the rest. Step careful past the head, mind the patch of wet-and-slippy streaking outwards, turn sideways to edge the three of them through the door.

It wasn't till he got the first snap of breeze through his nose, clear and leafy over the perpetual city fumes, that he was hit again by just how choking the air had been inside, how thick the stink of blood that he was mostly carrying with him.

Fideo loped up alongside in muted footfalls, sliding over turned soil. "It's clear."

Sands let go of El's wrist to dig in his pocket and held out his keys, rattling deliberately. "Get the car. Left along the street, past the intersection." They were snatched from his hand, Fideo trotting away along the path ahead of them.

It was easier to move out here, knowing the stone ran straight and clear, no furniture, no walls, no bodies, just _move_, matching his steps to the kid's to keep it smooth, El held steady at his neck.

His right arm was going numb, El's thigh bearing down over the bone of his forearm, and he didn't want to try and shift or he might drop the fucker.

They stopped inside the gate, hanging back out of sight, waiting till the familiar engine slid into idle on the street right alongside.

Fideo jumped out, running round to tug open the door, and they dumped El's ass on the edge of the back seat, Sands smacking his head on the roof _fuck_ as he backed out from under El's arm. Round the other side, sliding into the back and pulling to lay El out across the seat, his head tugged over Sands' lap as the other mariachis shoved his feet in and slammed the door.

Sands reached for the jacket he'd left in the back, wrestling with it as he shrugged it up along his arms, which would have been a hell of a lot easier if he didn't have to consider not tossing El off of his lap to flop around on the floor.

The engine fired up as soon as the kid hit the driver's seat, and he swerved out hard into the flow of traffic. "We need a doctor."

Paper rustled and crackled stiff in Fideo's hands, and Sands guessed he was unfolding the map. "Do you know one here?"

"Why the fuck would I, I've never been near this fucking city." Solid thump against the plastic of the steering wheel. "Shit, where's the hospital in this fucking district?"

"No hospitals," Fideo said, fast and flat. "The police will come, take fingerprints, and they've got enough of El Mariachi's to match."

"You think he'd want to die instead?"

"He wouldn't like prison." Fideo's voice this time was lower, softer.

"So you're happy to just drive around and watch him bleed."

Sands finally got the jacket dragged over his shoulders, buttoning it all the way to cover the Hawaiian disaster and the blood. "You guys didn't think to have this conversation a while back? The whole 'what to do if I'm not around to kick your asses' bit?"

"Did you?" Lorenzo snapped back.

Sands hadn't sat down for any such conversation with El, but he had his own ways of dealing with things that worked just fine. These two dickfeeds needed step-by written instructions to take a bath. "Get us onto the major streets and shut the fuck up."

He took the cell from El's pocket - it was less hassle to ditch and replace than his own, which he actually used - thankful he always set both phones up for international as he dialled.

The phone rang four times, then stopped with a click. At least the number hadn't changed. He could've found the new one, but not with the time limits he was working under.

"I know you're there, Sam," he said into the silence.

The pause dragged on a while longer before she spoke. "Sands?" He didn't answer; she didn't need him to. "So you are alive. I bet on it in the pool Jasinski's running, figured that way I'd finish ahead even if you were still around."

The car lurched round a tight left-hander, El rocking and swaying against Sands' lap, and Sands dropped his left hand to his chest to steady him. "No time for pleasantries, sugarcheeks, I need a name. I want an accommodating doctor near Polanco, and he'd better not be an idiot."

"Polanco, D.F? You're still in Mexico?" Surprise snapped her voice out of its usual slow, lilted rhythms.

"Not long enough to do you any good." He smiled the words through the connection. "Call this number when you've got an answer."

Quick, amused huff of air at his ear. "You're not worried what else I might be doing?"

"We both know you won't report this, and we both know why." He disconnected and flipped the cell shut before he snapped the smile off.

"How long's this gonna take?" Lorenzo demanded.

"Minutes." Foreman knew her shit, and it was low-level intel, kept around because nothing was ever tossed away 'just in case'. "Give me your phone." And the kid had some fucking sense when it mattered, because he didn't question it, rustling in his pocket to pass it back.

El was still breathing beneath his hand, a movement harsher and more ragged than natural sleep. Sands slid his fingers across to El's arm and down to the wrist, the pulse there jumping fast and light against his skin.

The kid hauled the car around again, traffic buzz building heavier outside. Sands tightened his grip, his forearm resting across El's chest, braced against the roll.

He'd never worked directly with Foreman, not close on the same investigation, but they'd been based out of the same office space on paperwork days, and her rep was pure efficiency, getting things done fast with minimal fuss. Not exactly one of the agency's whiter-thans, but she steered a more cautious pattern of radar avoidance than Sands had ever bothered to do.

He could see her; Christ, he could really _see_ her, hair in a dark wavy tail hanging over one shoulder, the curve of her neck bare and flowing into the length of her back as she peered at her screen from that bouncy, 'top-chiropractors-recommend-it' stool, legs and feet curled back elegantly round the base of it. Nothing special in the face - not baying at the moon beat, just a little nondescript - but she spent most of her off-hours on the squash court pounding anyone stupid enough to take her on, and she dressed and played that body of hers for every inch it was worth, just the way he would have done it. Elbows on the desk, chin on her linked hands, and yeah, that rendered the spine-special stool kind of moot, but that wasn't the point. Tits pushed together between her forearms giving her the cleavage of anyone's dreams, blouse pulled tight behind to cling down the undulations of her spine and the muscle running with it, and Sands had the twitch at his groin to go right along with the image. Just the basic hint of reaction, no real hard-on. The unconscious guy sprawled across his lap, heavy with the stink of blood, wasn't exactly conducive.

Sands had never screwed her - she knew him a little too well to make the offer. He'd considered it, when he'd dug up her cash-trickling scheme, thought of her beneath him, accepting and hating, face twisted into something beautiful by the loathing. It would have been fun once or twice, the rape of the willing, but generally Sands preferred someone in his bed who'd use some skill and effort to get him off instead of the mummy from the crypt, and it would have been a waste of such a useful lever.

He counted it a good decision now, with El breathing uneven against his thighs, the bounce of blood at El's wrist dropping away beneath his fingers, and Foreman's dark tapered nails tapping at her keyboard in his head.

El's phone buzzed alongside his thigh, skittering away across the seat. He snatched it up and flipped it open without speaking.

"I've got your man. Goes by the name of Sanchez, but I'm not pinning any guarantees to that part."

"Close?"

"Works out of Claveria." A couple of districts north, headed away from the centre.

"And the part about him not being an idiot?"

"He's the knife of choice for Guerrero's people."

Which meant he was competent, but a long way from Sands' idea of safe. "A cartel man wasn't exactly what I had in mind."

"He's freelance, not kept. Give it an hour, and I might be able to come up with an alternative, though."

Sands paused, let the connection hang silent while he counted off the seconds, five, eight, ten, long and dragging. "Give me his details and keep looking." It would at least keep Foreman off the rails some - she wouldn't know he'd be going right there.

He repeated the address she gave aloud, a little slow, as if memorising or writing it down, and the car swung a hard right as he finished.

"You got a number to go with that address?"

"Will do in another ten."

More seconds tapping past, counting down in the distant click of fingernails on keys.

"Got it." Sands keyed the numbers into Lorenzo's phone as she gave them, then passed it forward to Fideo.

"Ring it." He shaped the words near-silent with his lips.

Foreman was there at his ear again, her lingering hints of southern twang sharpened by amusement. "I'd hope it's something serious, but you don't sound like you're dying."

Sands smiled his voice down the line. "Oh, I think I'll be just fine. I'll be sure to let you know if I'm not." She wouldn't be expecting him to call in this favour for somebody else, and it was information he liked her much better without.

He flipped the cell closed and switched it off. The other call would be going through, and it was a typical enough note to ditch her on that it wouldn't set her thinking.

Fideo didn't hand the other cell back when he got the connection. "I've got a friend who'd like to see you, very soon." Pause. "No, he can't talk right now, he's asleep."

The dipso had the sense to play it cautious over an open line, and Sands was more than happy to leave him with the phone. Broadcasting his American-accented Spanish across cartel connections wasn't on his list of smart moves.

El's pulse threaded past Sands' fingers, and he slid his right hand under El's shirt, onto the curl of hair. El's skin was cool beneath the tacky salt of old sweat.

El was never cool. His hands, his feet, sometimes, padding round the apartment barefoot on the tile; but his chest, his stomach where the hair tapered to a line and skin moved taut over muscle, his body was a furnace in Sands' bed, heat pressed up close beneath the sheets.

Sands left his hand there, light, to rise and fall with the heavy sounds, the brush of El's air over his knee, his mind background tracking Fideo's half of the quick Spanish exchanges till the dipso leaned round the seat to demand, "Was he awake?"

"Yeah, and talking just fine." Sands stuck with the Spanish, but deliberately slurred. The cell would distort it more for him. "He shut up maybe three minutes before you showed up."

Fideo switched back to the phone, checking the info had made it over the line. More short snatches of detail, pauses for the questions, Sands following for any points to rebuff or elaborate on, until two words snatched and clicked in his head. "A positive."

Sands hadn't known, wouldn't have been able to answer a question like that when he needed to.

He wouldn't forget it now, and he made a mental note to tell El his own type later.

It might not be a bad idea to give El the details of a few people he could tap for information too, just in case there was a time Sands wasn't as around and awake as he might like to be himself. Though he should probably scratch Foreman from the list - now she knew he was alive, she'd start to think, and she might have some ideas in place ready for the next time someone called.

A storage box with encoded details of his accounts might be a reasonable precaution too.

Hell, he'd tell El all that shit now, if El had any interest in that side of the business. But if he had to go toes up, he'd rather El got his cash than the ball-squeezing banks. Even if the stupid fuck did just go and toss it all out to the grasping peasants again.

Sands' pulse jumped fast through his body, keeping beat with El's at his fingertips. The itch crawled high in his throat, the twitch tugging through the fingers of his right hand, the lifetime call of the nicotine to calm and soothe and steer his thoughts.

He reached for the pack in his pocket, felt the hitch in El's body along his thigh as he breathed, and he let the carton slide back down.

A low beep came from the seat in front as Fideo cut off the call. "He'll be there. He wanted to know how we got the number, so I said a friend told me. He asked which friend – I said I'd have to check with them first."

Sands tipped his head back to the seat behind him, nails tapping on the plastic of the door. He wouldn't think about cigarettes. "We can't give him the names we know of, he might decide to check. We'll keep it that the friend prefers to stay low key."

"You got that place on the map yet? Am I sticking with Escobedo or taking Nacional?" The kid's voice was terse, strained, but everything he said focussed on the practical. Sands was starting to see why El liked having him around.

"I have it. Take Nacional."

The car picked up speed again, a pressure at his back and a lurch to the left with a change of lane. Brakes sharp, bringing them down to the flow of traffic, and El's body rocked, swaying towards the seat edge. Sands dropped his hand back to El's arm, gripping tight against the pull. "Ease back on the driving, I don't think we wanna talk to a traffic cop right now." He didn't want to end up puking either.

Christ, he needed a smoke.

El's phone pressed against his hip through his pocket, under El's weight; El's phone with Foreman's number sitting there in its memory, in its call log.

He'd made the contact. Any wad of seagull shit aiming for his head because of it was already on its way down.

He could do it. Temptation, his first and favourite fuck, and no reason now not to lay her again.

He reached for the phone, switched it back on, slow five count till it bleeped ready to go, and hit redial.

No characteristic silence this time as the ring sliced off, just Foreman short and snappish. "What?"

"I want one more little favour."

"Fuck off, I've done your deal. We're one for one."

"Do this one thing, and you won't hear from me again."

Old-familiar huff of air across the connection. "Yeah, sure, because I'll believe you."

Sands smiled, easy and confident. "You know, I think you will."

He didn't say anything more as the pause lingered, as the seconds ticked in his head. Her curiosity would win, it always did.

"Just what the fuck is it you're chasing?"

He couldn't ask for everything - get too greedy, too much risk, too much time, she'd tell him to go fuck himself, and he'd lose the lot. Keep it sliced lean to the most important detail. "I want you to take a sweep through the files for me. Find out whose idea it was to put me in the right place to buy the sewage farm."

"So you can plan another outing with some pet assassin?" Her voice was back high, amused. She'd never liked him, but she hated boredom and routine the same way he did. "Why the hell should I?"

Sands tapped a finger on the casing of the phone by his ear, light and plastic and slow. "Because you're not completely tidy yourself. Because I know you too well to think you'll keep your nose shiny white for long. Because you don't want the people who fucked me over to start counting up the tab on you."

The connection went silent again, no breath, not even line crackle, just the pure absence of digital at his ear.

It didn't matter. She was still there.

His hand was sliding to his pocket, to the square pack of nicotine tucked inside the fabric. Pressure shifted in a steady, fast rhythm along his thigh, the cyclic push of El's shoulders and ribs.

Her breath was back. "I'll call this number when I've got it."

Sands set his smile in place, wide. "Don't bother. I'll be in touch."

He thumbed the line dead, pulled the card from the phone, wiped the case clean of prints. The car had picked up speed again, rumbling traffic in multiple lanes around them. He cranked open his window, whistling rush of air and thick stench of fumes in his face, and dropped the cell to be crushed under the wheels.

The fake moustache prickled at his lip, sticky with trapped sweat. He reached up to peel it away, short, sharp, wincing at the drag, the tingle lingering on his skin.

The car rolled and hummed and bumped along in spurts and stops, and El still breathed.

Nothing to do now, all of it fixed, just sit and wait. The crackle of the map, the low words as Fideo passed on directions to the kid, the voices from the sidewalks dropping back and fading out. Less traffic now, and most of it big, heavy, industrial. Warehouse district.

No medic-for-hire held his clinics on a busy street, with prying eyes taking a good long look at his clientèle. They were getting close.

Lorenzo slowed the car, cruising, drifting it to a slow, cautious halt streetside.

Sands let Fideo get out and go knock to make the introductions. He was the one the medic already talked to.

The kid shadowed him, with that boring predictability. Sands dug the silencers out of the door pocket alongside him, screwing them in place on the tips of his Berettas.

The sidekicks were back within minutes, tugging open the door by El's feet. "Looks legit. Get him inside."

The space they carried El into was big, but not open. Thin walls tapped hollow against Sands' elbow as they hustled him along - cheap partitions, little more than chipboard, doing almost nothing to dull the sound, the sensation of distance behind it.

He let Lorenzo lead, let him edge them sideways through a door, slide El's ass onto a surface. With sheets at Sands' hand and metal edge at his hip to guide, stretching him out was easy.

Sands found himself a spot by the door where he could overhear everything in the immediate rooms and left the Two Stooges to do the talking. It was obvious enough the kind of doctor they'd come to when he didn't bother mentioning how El should be in a hospital. Lounging against a dividing wall that shivered at his weight, Sands was just another guy in dark glasses with a jacket draped over too many guns. If he moved around too much or opened his mouth, he instantly became the Blind Gringo, and he wasn't feeling like being memorable right now.

Maybe he should have spent more time speaking Spanish with El, it might have smoothed over his accent. The last couple of years had worked to iron out El's English - not that it had ever been so bad, but those stilted phrases that marked the ESL had eased back some.

Soft, efficient sounds around El, the doc's shoes light and shuffling on the smooth floor; cupboards and drawers opened and closed, the squeaky metallic rumble of something on wheels dragged towards whatever was serving as a bed right now.

'Sanchez' moved back from El, sliding over to the corner where the sidekicks were keeping out of his way, passing words fast and quiet between themselves. "I'm giving him blood to replace what he's lost. He'll need surgery to find the bullet and fix the bleeding."

"So do it." Lorenzo, as charmingly direct as ever.

"I start at forty thousand dollars. Depending what I find inside, it could go up to two hundred thousand."

Sands' lips twitched at the choice of currency. Nothing said drugs south of the border quite like the US buck.

"We've got it," the kid said. "Not right here, 'cos you know, this isn't the kind of day we planned on, but we can lay hands on it inside an hour."

"That's fine. I'll start work when you get back."

A rustle from Lorenzo, short, distinct. "I told you we can get it." His tone had snapped taut, right along with his body. "So fix him now."

The doc's voice stayed perfectly light and pleasant. He probably met street thugs with guns on a daily basis. "I don't know who you are, and you won't give me the name of your 'friend' as a reference. I might have chosen not to see you at all."

Sands pushed himself away from the wall, obvious movement to attract attention, and smiled slow and thoughtful with closed lips towards that low tenor voice. "You'll start now," he said. "And I'll stay here to see that you do." He spoke in English with exaggerated Spanish inflection, dramatising the accent El carried in his worst flashes of temper. The doc would know he wasn't Mexican, but he wouldn't know what the hell he was behind it.

He tipped his head, let the smile widen a little more. "Just consider me insurance."

Silence from 'Sanchez', a still silence that carried, and Sands held himself casual, unconcerned. The doctor was an educated man, and his background included meetings with a wide and interesting variety of people.

Sands eased the smile back to a faint twist at the edges of his lips, and let him study.

The doc dropped back into motion, feet brushing towards El. "If you're staying, you can help me push him through for surgery." He twisted round to aim words over his shoulder at the brat. "You get going and bring the payment. I want you back in an hour."

Sands could find El, that was no problem, and he moved forward to rest his hands on those metal edges. More low muttered words between the sidekicks, and when Lorenzo tapped back through towards the door, fast and fluid, Fideo went with him.

Fideo's feet paused at the corner. "We'll be back, and you'll get your money." Low voice with no threat, just steady fact.

It was probably a little late to start playing good cop, but confrontation never was the dipso's style.

"I'll wheel him through, you push the oxygen cylinder," the doc said to Sands, no response to the departing mariachi.

Sands didn't know where the fuck the oxygen was; El he had his hands on. "I'll take the bed." Let the doc think he was being an over-protective brainfuck, didn't matter to Sands. "You go first, you know where you want him."

The metal shivered beneath Sands' hands with a couple of low clicks – presumably 'Sanchez' was taking the brakes off the wheels. He pushed gently, experimentally, and the trolley bed slid a few inches.

The doc shuffled round towards El's head, then on, dragging something that clanked on squeaky, uneven wheels. The noise echoed from hard floor to solid exterior walls, and Sands could have followed him from half a street away. Judging how hard to push to keep a smooth pace and the right distance was harder. He missed the doorway by a few inches, the doc grabbing the front end of the bed to redirect it, but a guy with eyes who was unfamiliar with the equipment could have screwed that up.

The doc stopped hauling and started fiddling instead. "Wait outside, I don't want you in the way while I'm working."

Sands was happy enough to retreat back to the other room and his chosen patch of wall, where he wasn't at such a risk of flashing his name up in tricolour neon. He fished out his cigarettes and finally lit himself that smoke. This wasn't a fucking hospital, and nobody was gonna be throwing him out the door.

He wondered what the fallout would be the next time he contacted Foreman. He was pretty sure she had too much to lose, but... if she'd cleaned up her house some since he first tapped on her shoulder, she might just gamble that snagging the outstanding Sheldon-fish would outweigh the exposure of some old news misdeeds.

He'd still be making the call.

The doc's feet padded around beyond the wall, more rattling of cupboards and drawers.

Another door, further off, and a voice, new, deeper, and Sands was two steps out from the wall, hand on a Sig, the filter of his smoke tight between his teeth.

The voice and its one set of feet moving closer, no attempt to be subtle, moving through to the next room with El. Somebody expected, that soft tenor voice talking back, rapid, fluid, and Sands let his weight drop back, shoulders sinking to meet the wall – a nurse or some kind of tech guy the doc was giving orders to.

It made sense. Sands wasn't under any illusions this would be the full hi-tech hospital set up 'Sanchez' had here, but something was bleeping medical and regular and positive behind the door.

The talk went on; the cupboard noises stopped. A sharp, chemical note oozed into the air, deepening as Sands breathed.

The sidekicks came back with the dough, and the doc emerged, stripping gloves from his hands in that familiar latex stretch-and-slap. Wouldn't want to get blood on the pay-off while he checked its validity.

They never met the nurse guy, he stayed out back. Probably both the doctor and the nurse liked it better that way.

Sands lounged against his wall, the bleeping embedding itself deep in his head. He'd still be hearing it a fucking day after it stopped. He held himself still, listening beyond it, as the stiffness crept through his muscles and the itch crawled over his skin with every hint of sound.

He shifted his weight between his feet every fifteen minutes or so.

This wasn't a good place for Sands to be, and he had no reason to stick around. El would survive or curl up and die just the same irrespective of whether Sands hung pointlessly about the hallways, and the sidekicks could be relied on to keep watch over the doc.

He could walk out, lose himself in the nearby streets, clear of anything nasty that might show up.

But outside of himself, he'd no reliable source of information. If El died, the sidekicks might not bother to call and fill him in. If El lived, they might just drag the unconscious mariachi off someplace and opt out of asking the sociopath along for the ride. They could pay off the doc easily enough, so if Sands went back and was told El was dead, he wouldn't even know whether to believe it.

Holding the doc at gunpoint with one hand while the other groped over the corpses in the freezer out back wasn't his idea of a good time.

He had no idea how likely it was. The kid loathed him, sure; Fideo – he didn't have much to go on there, Fideo seemed to reserve most of his thinking for where the next bottle was. So far as Sands could tell, Fideo had no real attitude towards him either way - whatever was good with El was good with the drunk seemed a reliable default - but he'd probably find it easier to go along with the brat instead of fighting him over it.

The machines bleeped beyond the wall, muffled exchanges irregular and terse between the doc and his assistant. Sands probably wouldn't have understood half of it, even if he'd been able to pick out the words.

He set his shoulders back to the wall and lit another cigarette.


	8. Chapter 8

The wall was a single wood-based expanse, without any joins or panels Sands could detect. No hint of grain to catch against the leather of his gloves as they wandered its surface; he'd feel the irregular compressed mass of chipboard if he took off his gloves, which he wasn't going to do.

It tapped light and hollow beneath his fingers, the filter of his cigarette twitching between them.

He'd spent a while sitting at the base of it, the cool of the smooth, finished floor soaking through his jeans. But he sure as fuck wasn't going to be sleeping here, and he was standing again now, the press of almost-wood heavy over the bone of his shoulder blades in spite of his jacket.

It was a very boring wall, and Sands was already more familiar with it than he liked. He really didn't want to get to know it any better.

The doc was still around, but the nurse-tech-whatever guy had disappeared a while back, and Sands didn't like that either.

He made his way carefully along the wall, to where the sidekicks had picked their own patch of space, liquor blending thick with the antiseptic in his nose. "We're leaving. Now."

"We can't leave, he's not even awake." Kneejerk protest from the brat was obviously right back in style.

"If he was going to die, he'd have done it by now," Sands drawled, flat. "The doc said he's stable, so he can be stable someplace that isn't here."

"Yeah, and what if something goes wrong? We're staying."

Sands stepped closer, right up into the kid's personal space, his voice dropping low and slow. "We made a point of advertising that El Mariachi was back in action, and now here we are - a gunshot Mexican and an American who never takes off his shades. El wouldn't want to be on site when people get to hearing about that any more than I would." He tipped his head with a slight smile. "Our friendly neighbourhood knife is only in this for the money, and even if he doesn't sell us out, who knows when his favourite clients might choose to drop by for a fix up?"

This time there was a pause, and when the words came, they were half agreement. "How will we know if he's getting worse?"

Sands stretched the smile out wide. "Well, we ask, of course."

Shifting and scraping from the floor as the dipso scrambled to his feet, and Sands tailed the sidekicks through to the next room where the doc had holed up, wrapped in bitter coffee fumes.

"We're getting out of here." Sands laid out a statement before the brat could make it a question.

"Fine, whenever you like." Sanchez only sounded bored. Sands figured he didn't care much either way – if they stayed, he got paid for his time, otherwise he went home.

"When will he wake up?" Fideo asked.

A rustle from the doc, and a non-committal tone to go with the gesture. "It could be any time now. But the damage is to his liver, and his liver clears the anaesthetic and sedatives from his system – I kept the doses down, but it might take longer than normal."

"How long?" The brat this time, and a whole lot less friendly. Sanchez seemed to have made his way onto Lorenzo's list of those deserving the full Sands treatment.

"I'd want him awake by tonight. If not, you'll need to see somebody about getting more fluids into him."

"Get his pills," Sands said. "Antibiotics, painkillers."

"Anything else?" Light amusement from the doc, and Sands' mind drew in the raised eyebrow to go with it.

Well, he could always oblige. "We need a flashlight. And a mirror, a small one." The sidekicks had left the car somewhere a little less conspicuous than the front door when they came back with the cash, but Sands wasn't putting himself or El anywhere near it till the dipso had given it a complete check.

"You get all that when I get my payment up to date." Amusement gone, back to the brisk businessman, and Sands left the kid to deal with the financials.

When the appropriate paper bags had been exchanged, the sidekicks went off to bring the car around, Fideo to run the inspection and the brat to cover him. The doc busied himself unhooking El from the various bleepers, leaving the building oddly silent, only the hollow echoes of their feet through the walls.

Getting El into the Chevy and draped over the back seat was the usual pain in the ass affair – they'd made the transport selection based on what was inconspicuous, not what would make a good ambulance. The 'hospital' building had no windows, and the doc stayed inside and left them to deal with carrying their patient. A wise decision, since Sands would have killed him if he'd shown any interest.

It might have been prudent to shoot him anyway, but it was fine balance between controlling the information leakage and setting yet another group of thugs actively hunting them, pissed at the loss of their convenient first aid kit. Normally Sands wouldn't have worried too much about that last part, but normally he wouldn't have been sticking around.

The air was cool on his skin, the day's sweat a dry, clammy coating smeared under his clothes. He slid himself into the back, dragging El over his lap again, fingers light on his ribs to track the steady rise and fall of his breathing.

The sidekicks dropped into the front, the engine kicking in with just a couple of turns. Sands felt the fall in tension immediately, the inevitable exhaustion starting to sap at his bones and his mind without the adrenaline to keep him ticking, and he let his head drop back against the rest.

"Okay, your plan for the sudden departure, so where we going now?"

It was inevitable that the kid wouldn't leave him in fucking peace. "Anywhere that isn't here."

"Fine. Back to the apartment then," Lorenzo announced over the rising engine.

Sands raised his head to aim the glasses stare at the mirror. "That's no obvious improvement. When people start asking questions, they're going to find out where we've been seen."

"So what's your choice? Wander round the city till we fall over some shack that's empty? Or try checking into a hotel carrying an unconscious guy? We can't take him far."

Sands didn't want to go far right this minute, he only wanted safe. But safe didn't exist in this country.

Sands didn't like it any more than he'd liked anything since he found himself on a plane to fucking Mexico.

His head slid backwards again, the press of cheap cloth itching past the hair at his neck.

"So I guess that makes it the apartment."

Sands was way too goddamn tired to sink his teeth into those satisfied tones.

The irritating thing was the skipped sleep didn't seem to be wearing on the kid at all, but he had over a decade working in his favour.

There wasn't much traffic at this hour, even in Mexico City, and they made the run fast by local standards. The kid was keen enough not to attract the attention of the local blue boys that Sands' stomach didn't have to suffer, and El only rocked gently over his thighs with the turns and the lights. Sands wedged himself between the seat back and the door, and swayed along with him.

He shrugged off the lethargy and the brain-haze when the kid braked the car to a halt and killed the engine. If they'd been tabbed already, any retribution would be coming right down on this apartment.

He let the sidekicks check the place over before he slid out of the car himself; since he was stuck with them, he saw no reason not to maximise the occasional benefits of having them around.

They stretched El along the bed, stripping off what was left of his clothes after the doc had hacked them open, leaving him in underwear and bandages beneath the sheets. Sands peeled off his jacket and dropped into the chair in the corner, the holsters still wrapped heavy and secure round his body. No beetlefuck was gonna be shooting El through the window, not after Sands had gone to this much effort to keep the bastard alive.

He pushed off his shoes, stretching his feet and wriggling out his toes, and fuck, but that felt good, right there. He circled his wrists and his shoulders, flexing out the stiffness of immobility and lousy support, teasing his body to loosen and relax.

The back of the chair was too short to drop his head onto without his shades staring right up at the ceiling, so he slouched lower with his head to one side, the thick ribboned weave of the fabric pressing deep into his cheek.

That was fine for maybe ten minutes, but if he stayed that way, he was gonna fuck up his goddamn neck, the revealing little tug of tension already creeping through. He wriggled round to curl more on his side, easing the angle.

That was good a while longer, before the pressure started to tell, the numbness creeping through his thigh where bone pressed close against the frame beneath the fabric, and it wasn't even the hip he'd been goddamn shot in.

He climbed up on the bed and stretched out alongside El, because El was piss all use for watching his back right now, but slumping in the chair was a bitch on his spine, and it felt more normal this way. Even if El did stink of antiseptics and blood instead of old smoke and sweat.

Sands lay as it crept over him, wrapped around him; the stench of surgery, of blood oozing and clotting on dressings, close, right under his nose, close enough to be part of _him_, part of his thudding heart and his trapped and twitching mind.

El smelled of pain, and darkness, and the drowning, all-consuming fear of ever-lasting _nothing_, things that made Sands want to bolt from the room and get himself as far from that smell as the next fucking state; but he'd screwed that kind of reaction down hard before, and it wasn't gonna crawl back in and mindfuck him in the third act of the play.

The outline of the Beretta's grip dug hard against ribs, beneath the pressure of his own body. Solid, real, definitively practical, only less so right now when it was this goddamn tricky to get at, and he shifted to pull it from the holster. Set the gun on the bed beside him instead, under his hand.

El was stretched out just beyond it, laid flat on his back, motionless but for his breathing, slow and even and light.

El didn't know how to be still. Awake, he shifted restless like an unmedicated ADD case, reached for and fiddled with anything that got within reach of his goddamn hands, reacted to every hint of external movement in a snapped instant of altered muscle tension and a shiver of lids with the shift of his eyes. Asleep, he wriggled with soundlessly murmuring lips and twitching fingertips through the dreams, sprawled across the bed kicking at sheets in the heat and pushed up against Sands in the cool.

The Mariachi knew stillness, held patient and perfect before the strike, but the killer breathed deliberate and controlled on a very different level.

This was sharing a bed with Peasant Pedro, the man who would have slept snoring deep with a wife, ten kids and a guitar, no hint in him of everything he'd shaped and done and become. Not till Sands ran fingers over his chest, down his biceps and across his palm, over the scars with no place on the body of a mariachi picking up tips from tourists in cheap bars.

His hands always gave him the truth. Other senses could be twisted, deceived, aided by an imagination that sometimes edged a little cozy-close with the paranoid, and not enough goddamn _sleep_, but what he touched was real and known, didn't need to be filtered and reconstructed in his head.

He kept the touch, fingers of his left hand resting below El's collarbone, moving there with the steady sounds of his breath. His palm lay over the muscles of El's arm, slack against him now as he slept, and the first thing that would change when he woke. The Beretta lay cool under his elbow.

Sands wasn't going to sleep, he was going to shoot any motherfucker who came near this goddamn room. But his ears were good, and one positive aspect to a minor dose of paranoia was he'd react to more than he had to, not less. He didn't have the classic hassle of struggling to keep his eyes open either.

He could doze a little, where he was.

Time shrank and stretched around him in uneven patches, Sands' fingers leaving El and the gun after the longer reaches to brush over his watch, tracking it through what was left of the night. The city was the automatic double-check in his head; the rising buzz of traffic with the morning, the murmur of voices and slamming doors from the next door apartment, the inflexible weekday routine before the walls fell silent again, everyone left for the day.

And then he was awake, head sharp and focussed, senses stretching. A noise in the hallway, close, way too close, steps deliberately altered and quieted, and his arm was up and over El, Beretta rigid on the door as it cracked open.

"It's me." The kid spoke fast, but kept the words low.

"Well speak up sooner and don't creep about like that," Sands snapped. "He'll be pissed if he wakes up and finds out I shot you."

"I thought you might both be asleep, didn't wanna wake you."

Sands slid the auto away into its holster and dragged himself upright on the bed, straightening the shades over his nose. "I thought him waking up was the point."

Lorenzo paused, then offered, "I brought food."

Sands could smell that much, but kept shut on the subject so it didn't go away again. "I hope you're a better cook than El."

"I can't cook for shit, why d'you think he took over so fast?" Lorenzo grinned. "Don't worry, you're getting take-out." Heavy paper rustles as the kid came closer, dumping the bag and all its warm scents on the bed alongside him, and Christ, he hadn't eaten since early yesterday.

Now he was awake enough to remember he was goddamn starving.

He unrolled the top of the bag, the flavour-wave heavy on his tongue, cooked tomato and cheese and fuck, coffee, his fingers finding cartons with foil and the cardboard edge of a plate. Groping down alongside to warm styrofoam and easing it out, the coffee fumes already thick and rich with sugar as he peeled off the lid.

The kid hadn't moved, still standing right there by the foot of the bed. "If anything changes, I'll let you know," Sands said, dry. He didn't anticipate enjoying the company of any mournful sidekicks, standing vigil.

No great surprise when the kid didn't take the hint, but Sands was busy prioritising, the liquid bitter and too-hot beautiful, sucked in through his teeth and swallowed fast past the burn of his tongue. Half the cup downed in strangled, fiery gulps before his fingers reluctantly released it on the nightstand, and he set about unearthing the food from the bag's depths.

Something prickled in the quality of the silence, and no way would the kid manage to keep it shut much longer. He never could.

"You know, I never could figure it out." When it came it was light, quiet-thoughtful, and with more than a hint of leading edge. "You I got, but I didn't get why a guy like El would stick around somebody like you."

"El knows his reasons as well as I would." Sands angled his head up towards the kid, curled the edges of his lips into bare smile. "You must have done some experimental drilling once or twice over the last couple of months."

Lorenzo huffed out air through his nose, a level of El-inspired exasperation Sands was more than familiar with. "Sure I did. And when he stopped avoiding it all ways, he said you made him breathe, whatever the fuck that means." His voice dropped, slowed. "Whatever it was, we couldn't do it."

"It means you wasted your time playing nice," Sands said, short. For a cynic and a killer, the kid had a lot to learn. "When somebody's wallowing six feet deep in their own self-pity, 'nice' isn't going to cut it. You've just gotta grab them by the hair and haul them out, whether they'd like to sit tight in the quicksand or not."

"You're saying he likes you because you're a bastard."

"Hardly, but he crawled out of his little desert cave because I am."

Lorenzo's words hardened, sharpening into the old Sands special. "That wasn't ever about you, that was about the fucker who killed Carolina."

Sands let his smile broaden, tooth-filled and brightly cheery. "Why do you think I approached him the way I did? A discussion of price over a drink would have been easier, and much more civilised than having him collected at gunpoint, not to mention safer on a personal level when you're dealing with a notorious assassin. The problem was, it wouldn't have worked." He dumped the contents of a carton onto the plate – something with cheese and spice, he was hungry enough not to care – and flattened his expression along with his voice. "El has three really big buttons right up front, guaranteed to trigger a reaction, every time – love, guilt, and anger. He was working the first two a little too well on his own, so I pressed hard on the third."

"And got yourself El Mariachi."

"Oh, dragging him out for Marquez was too easy. Keeping him out, well, that took a little more effort." Sands' eyebrows flicked high above his shades and his smile.

"Yeah, it would." Another short pause, and this time it was pure silence from the kid, without the constant, restless twitching. "You actually love him." He almost left it a statement, only the slight tail lashing loose at the end to make it a query.

Sands shrugged, sliding his fork in from the edge of his plate till he hit food. "I highly doubt it, but really, I wouldn't know."

"I guess you wouldn't." A shift of a sole as Lorenzo turned, three steps towards the door before he stopped again. "Don't let anything happen to him."

"I'm not the one who brought him back here," Sands pointed out, stiff.

"I didn't ask him to come."

"But you knew you didn't have to, right?" Sands' eyebrows drew in, angled, the muscles of his face held tight and flat. "One quick phone call disguised as a warning, and he'll come running all on his own."

"It wasn't like that."

"Probably not. I don't credit you with being devious enough to do it."

The brat sniffed, deliberate, obvious. "Maybe I just don't want to fuck with my friends."

"Except when it suits you." Sands smiled, cold curl with an edge of teeth. "You'd be happy enough to talk him away from me, if you had the slightest idea how to do it."

The kid took the last few strides back to the door, and he didn't turn to look when he answered. "Maybe."

The door closed behind him, a single soft click.

Sands' head stayed tipped towards the door as he shovelled food into his mouth and chewed, listening to the footsteps move away down the hall.

Well, that was something of a change.

He didn't have enough information yet to decide if change and the kid's illusions were likely to be a good thing, or yet another Lorenzo-induced pain in the ass.

El breathed alongside him, repetitive monitored sound, low, slow, steady.

Sands had done some research on love in the past. It made people do things they wouldn't otherwise do, and that made it useful, and that made it worth the effort of understanding. Unfortunately, the entire concept had turned out to be so ridiculously nebulous that no two people could ever agree on how to define it, and Sands had gone right back to the detailed studies of individuals and what they'd do for what leverage. The method worked, and Sands didn't waste too much time over what tags people chose to put on the leverage.

But for something nobody could define, the idea was still powerful enough that even somebody as burned out as the kid was pitifully eager to slap the label on anything that half way shaped to the mould.

Sands hadn't ever bothered to examine how closely his arrangement with El might be interpreted to squeeze into that particular mould. Now, though, the kid had gone and tossed a whole new set of variables out into the room, and Sands was going to have to work with them and around them over the next few weeks.

He chewed mindlessly through the food, running over the files stored in his head, the little consensus he'd managed to drag together of what the kid might be seeing.

Taking relatives out of the equation, wanting to fuck someone more than the few times it took to get bored with their attempts at conversation seemed to be a basic component. And wanting them close by at least part-time outside of the fucking scenarios.

Maybe that's what all the romantic eulogising about love ended up as - someone you could stand being around most of the time, without wanting to beat their brains out through their ears more than a fleeting once in a while.

Hell, from what he'd seen, love was probably more about being fucking desperate; somebody getting to be important enough that not having them around screwed over a big part of your life, and badly enough you could never quite get it back. That's what the wife with the knives had done to El, and unfortunately that was the likely effect El's absence would have on Sands - kick him a couple of thousand feet back down the mountain he'd clawed himself up with his fucking fingernails rammed full length in the dirt. He could get himself another fuck, a hired gun with decent reflexes, could always find a mental plaything or two to keep him interested – he'd run through those options more than once, when El pissed him off by playing particularly stubborn – but only as long as the money held out, and with the constant risk of someone unpleasant offering more.

Some people might consider he'd been a bit too short-termist, reconstructing his detail sourcing with the mariachi built into it somewhere down near foundation level, but he hadn't exactly had the luxury of a few years to do it the ideal way (as if there could be anything fucking ideal about having somebody poke your eyes out then hunt you down); he'd needed to get himself functional whichever way was quickest and worked.

Sands didn't have much use for labels. There were some people around who just fell too neatly into certain categories not to be made use of, but most labels were simplistic and led to screw-ups, especially the ones people applied to him. He didn't have a convenient descriptor to hang on all his tangled reasons for keeping El around, and if Little Lori wanted to call it 'love', Sands saw no reason not to let him. Somehow he doubted El would use the word.

Kind of a pity, really – he could always use another lever to pull on for those occasions when the Mariachi dug his spurs in on him.

His fork scraped unhindered over cardboard, and he swept it around once more to be sure, then downed the last of the coffee.

He wasn't even sure what the hell it was he'd just eaten, outside of the obvious flavours still lingering on his tongue. The food was a vague memory of automatic shovel-and-swallow, and the pleasing absence of that pinched feeling under his ribs.

He dumped the plate in the bag and the bag on the floor, and he was still so fucking tired he just wanted to stretch back out and let the time roll past in waves, but damn, he needed to piss.

El's breath was there in the room, regular and unbroken, a background rhythm all through the conversation with the kid, behind the slow grind through his jaw as he ate. Sands dropped his fingers to El's wrist, to the pulse leaping up alongside the tendons, the unshakeable certainty of touch.

He slid his hand away and picked up the Beretta before he moved to the bathroom.

When he returned, he stretched himself over the bed alongside El again, water-damp fingers settling onto El's ribs, the definitive monitor of movement through the doze. Too-soft mattress creaking below him as he wriggled into place, feeling the fur settle in at the edges of his mind, warm and quiet, thought slipping back to awareness of now and here.

He couldn't have slept for long. Silence still from the next apartment, nobody home yet, internal clock telling him some time mid afternoon.

And El was awake beside him.

The muscles beneath his hand tightened, a shift on the pillow alongside his, and El's breath tickled slow over his cheek.

Sands' forehead dropped forward two inches, sinking deeper into the pillow as he relaxed, closer to that flow of warmth. Which pissed him off when he made the time to think about it because that was El's kind of shit, not his.

But it was something of a relief, knowing things weren't going to change.

It almost made him fucking laugh right there, because most of his life change had been what he thrived on, what he chased, the only thing that stopped his world spiralling into uncurtailed and wholly frustrating boredom. But that attitude had been rather forcibly rearranged when every basic thing in his day was strapped down into precision routine, when simplicities like brushing his goddamn teeth needed a system to make it something he could deal with. When he'd learned that change could mean someone tying him to a table and drilling into his _eyes._

He could almost think that now without instantly living in the feel of it. Well, not _think _about it, because that still brought up the heaving sweats and the spinning disconnection and the one-fifty pulse, and it was something he spent a lot of his time not doing. But he could shape the words, the empty concept in his mind, in a way that was almost neutral.

He wondered when El was going to stop thinking and get around to saying something. At least he wasn't the type to wake up all woozy and demanding the clichéd, 'Where am I?'

Sands had been waiting the better part of a day; he could lie here a few more minutes while El figured out what he needed to know, before he decided to let the world know he was back in it.

The breath slid away from Sands' cheek, a rustle across the pillow, El turning back to face the ceiling.

"So I didn't die," El said.

Sometimes the mariachi had a tendency to overstate the obvious. Evidently that hadn't changed either. "You never do," Sands pointed out.

"No. People like us don't die. We only get to live with it." El's breathing hadn't changed, still the same steady rise and accentuation of ribs as the skin pulled tight between them.

Sands sniffed. "I'd prefer a 'Thank you'."

There was a pause as if El were considering, or more likely patching back together what scraps he remembered of the trip out, shaping them into the quilt. "Thank you," he said eventually. At least the bastard sounded like he meant it.

"Don't imagine you're welcome. And don't expect me to haul your ass out of a fuck-up again, or I'll shoot you myself."

"I'll try to remember that."

Sands pushed himself upright on the bed, running his fingers down El's arm to the pulse at his wrist. "It's about time you woke up. Much longer, we'd have had to hook you up to the bags again, and I'm warning you for next time, I make a shitty nurse."

It was right back there again, catching at him, the simple 'next time' creeping in thoughtless and relaxed; the assumption that because El would live, he'd be with Sands.

"The uniform wouldn't suit you."

Sands tipped his head, his voice lightening to match El's. "Oh, I don't know, I could probably work with a skirt if it's cut below the knee."

"I meant the man's uniform, or do you have some other tastes you still haven't told me about?"

Sands curled his lips, the smile deliberately crooked. "I think you can guarantee that. I always keep a few secrets in hand for special occasions."

"And cross-dressing is one of them?"

"Well, if I told, it wouldn't be a secret any more, would it?" The sixty count at Sands' fingers was normal for El awake and relaxed, the back of his hand resting against the bandages that wrapped around El's torso. It had been close to twenty-four hours, they'd need changing. "You know, El, 'Don't get shot' was probably one of the more useful pieces of advice you've given me."

"I'm glad you've taken it."

"Well, so am I. Now I guess it's just you we've got to work on."

El didn't answer right away, and when he did, the humour was all stripped out, bare and bleak. "I was too slow."

Sands sometimes wished he could still stare down his nose at people. He guessed the effect worked out if the shades did half as good a job as he thought they might. "I worked that part out when I found you on the floor."

El's hair brushed rustling over the pillow as he shook his head. "I knew it was coming. I heard, and I knew, and the guns were loaded in my hands, but I was too slow."

_She's not supposed to be here, not yet, but she's here, shaking her hair to flow over her shoulder as she slides into the chair right across the table. Palm cupping her cheek, smiling with slanting mascara eyes and those big, glossy lips he likes dragging his teeth over, slow like threat, and he knows, he knows for maybe two entire stretching seconds before the needle pricks at his ne__ck -_

His fingers had tightened, digging down into El's skin.

There wasn't a whole lot in his head he'd genuinely want to lose, but he wished he could scrape out every last memory of that dog-sucking bitch - every one except the instant she twitched, her lips and breasts and breath hitching against him when he'd put a bullet straight through her sick and twisted guts, the quick little jump of her body into the hooked rigidity of pain before she fell away. That one he'd keep and digitise so it didn't degrade.

El didn't know the first goddamn thing about too slow, and Sands had racked up maybe five hours of sleep in the last fifty-six, and self-flagellation had never been the biggest attraction to wake up to. "You shot the fucker right after, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"And I'm gonna take a guess from all those scars I grope when we fuck that it's not the first time you screwed up, so it's just another chalk mark on a very long list. Don't start making this one out to be anything special."

A ripple through the mattress as El shifted closer, then froze, the distinct, tensed rigidity of surging pain. His breath held, still, ribs spread wide against Sands' fingers, then he eased it out slow, tentative, forcing himself to relax. "So what's the damage this time?"

"Well, you don't have as much liver as you used to. Apparently it's easier to carve out a chunk than try and stitch together something that looks like oatmeal."

Another soft rustle from El, movement small and cautious. "That's not so bad. If it was Fideo's, we'd have a problem."

Sands breathed sharp down his nose, a short, distinct huff of air. "Fideo's is so pickled it wouldn't know how to bleed."

"Not a theory I'd want to test." More of those delicate wrigglings, the systematic check-list of what worked and what didn't. "So where are we?"

Sands had been standing on the earth, familiar beneath him and solid, and suddenly he found it was a platform all along, rotten right through, leaving him to lurch and fall, heart spiking and stomach rolling at the drop. They hadn't changed a goddamn thing, the same bed, the same room, the same apartment they'd been living in for weeks. "You don't know?"

"I know I'm in a bed," El said easily. "I'll tell you the rest when I open my eyes, but you'll have to let my arms loose first."

Sands uncurled his grip, ran fingers light over El's cheekbone to the layer of lashes sealed and sticky over one eye. Okay, yeah, anaesthetic and a day or so unconscious, that would do it, and he should've thought before, but screw it, he'd already said he'd make a lousy nurse. Quick enough to fix, and his pulse was already dropping off with the relaxed tone of El's words. "Wait up, be right back."

He damped a facecloth in the bathroom, and filled a glass of water too, because the doc's injections would be wearing off any time now, if they hadn't already. Sands' personal take on getting shot was you could never have too many painkillers.

He didn't hear anything from the sidekicks; they'd probably be trying to fit some sleep into the day too.

He handed the cloth to El while he dug the bottles from his pocket and counted out pills. His role in keeping El alive and well ended once the mariachi was moving; he could fix his own bed bath.

He did hook an arm around El's shoulders, help ease him part way upright to take the drugs, holding the water glass for him as he sipped. He damn well didn't want El spilling it everywhere, it was his bed too.

El swallowed the last of the antibiotics, his head dropping back away from the glass and onto Sands' shoulder. "You need a shower," Sands told him.

"Not as much as you do."

"You stink like you've been dunked in antiseptic," Sands pointed out.

"Maybe I'll concede." The distaste was clear in El's voice. "You smell like... normal."

"Oh, that's real smooth, El, first you lecture on my likeness to an open drain, then you say it's normal."

El's head shifted at Sands' shoulder, his face turning closer into the fabric of his shirt. "I was enjoying normal."

"That's because you're batshit crazy." Sands set the glass back on the nightstand and wriggled his arm back out from behind El. "I suppose I should prod the sidekicks now you're awake. The dipso's stayed only barely drunk the last couple of days, it's almost impressive to see."

El didn't sink back down, his hands pressing creaking dimples in the mattress as he shifted higher, propping himself against the pillows. "Lorenzo keeps him in line when he needs to."

"I guess there's got to be one person who'll take the kid seriously." Sands tipped his head into the sound of footsteps along the hallway. "On second thoughts, looks like I can stay right here." The brat was bounding ahead in full Labrador style, the dipso trotting after him, and the door exploded inwards to smack against the wall.

"El! You're awake! We thought we heard voices, and the psycho here's not the talking-to-himself kind of psycho." Not even the reference to Sands could suck the grin out of the kid. "How you feeling?"

"Like I've been jumped on hard enough already, so please don't add to it." El's smile was there for the brat, instant and easy, like always.

"Hey, hey, I can keep my hands to myself when I got to." The kid had stopped six inches short of the bed, so Sands didn't have to beat him off.

"I don't think your women would say that." Fideo was hovering right behind him, talking over his shoulder.

"Yeah, but women like me that way," Lorenzo said, brightening the smile another couple of megawatts, before toning it back. "How are you, really?"

El shrugged, the movement a little stiff and shrunken alongside Sands. "It hurts. It's been worse. I've taken the pills."

Fideo pushed in closer, rustling past the kid. "Are you hungry? We ate before, but we picked things we can reheat."

A pause before El answered, taking time to assess the signals behind the all up front and obvious pain. "I don't think so. I think I just need to sleep."

"Come on, it's been over a day, El, you should eat something."

"No point pushing food at him, he'll just turn stubborn," Sands said. Between the appetite-suppressing effects of pain and the appetite suppression and nausea that went along with the opiates, El would have to be half-starved before his body admitted it, and Sands didn't want him throwing up. That wouldn't be comfortable for either of them.

"Not that he needs an excuse to be stubborn," the kid said, that smile dialling up again.

"I'm not stubborn, I just know what I want," El protested.

"See? That's stubborn, right there." Fideo's humour was dry and straight-faced, like always.

Sands swung his feet off the bed and walked over to the chair in the corner, fishing his cigarettes and lighter from his jacket pocket while the mariachis chattered in the background. Nicotine wasn't something he needed right now, but El's lungs were just fine, and he didn't want the brat getting the idea he was welcome to hang around.

He didn't need it, but the first heated roll of the smoke over his tongue felt good anyway. It always did.

He tightened his lips and released it as smooth little rings, jetting across the room to spread and disperse around the kid.

It was the dipso who made the offer to move, though, elbowing the brat none too subtle. "Hey, Lori, he said he needed to sleep. We should go."

"It's okay," El said, predictably. "You can stay a while, if you want."

Something else passing between the sidekicks, something almost silent in the barely-there gap. "Nah, we got some sleeping of our own to do," Lorenzo conceded with a grin. "You kept us up all night, we need to catch up."

"I'll try not to inconvenience you all so much next time." El's smile was creeping back in again, never gone for long when the kid was around.

"You damn well better not. I'm done with your emergency surgery sessions, they're getting too fucking old."

"It's only been twice," El pointed out. "As an emergency, anyway."

"And if you don't think twice is too fucking often, we'll make sure they take a look around inside your head next time too." The eye-roll that went along with the statement had to be a real piece of melodrama. "Next time you're awake, you gotta be hungry, 'cos we're not giving you a choice, okay?"

"I'll see what I can do," El called after him, flashing another of those quick smiles as the sidekicks hustled each other out of the room and pattered away along the hall.

Sands walked over to the door and shut it behind them.

El wriggled himself cautiously down the bed, a drawn-out drama of low creaks and harsh breaths as he made it back to the full length stretch. Sands tightened his lips to hold his cigarette and pushed the pillow back down flat under El's head.

He swung his feet up, stretching his legs out along the bed, but he didn't lie down himself, ignoring the pull of fatigue tight at his temples. El wasn't going to sleep anyway – the mariachi had the tight little buzz jangling all through him, too many thoughts roaming his head, alive with circling issues.

Sands dropped his head back to the wall, drew the smoke in deep and slow.

"When I die, I want to be buried at home."

Sands cocked his head El's way, let the glasses stare for him. "Shouldn't you be having this conversation with the sidekicks?"

"They won't be there, I hope," El said simply.

Sands plucked the filter from his lips, considered the balance of it as it rolled between his fingers. It was almost smoked through. "Where the hell's home for you anyway? Back in that miserable peasant dustbowl?"

"It's not so much the village. You said it yourself once - my home is with my family. My wife, my daughter."

Sands trickled the last of the smoke out slow through his nose, and crushed his cigarette into the ashtray. "If I'm still around and you take care to leave yourself someplace more subtle than the police morgue, I'll see you get freighted on ice. But somebody else is gonna have to piss around with funeral arrangements, because I'm not dragging a corpse back there personally."

"I wouldn't ask you to. Father Ríos will see to the rest."

Sands lifted an eyebrow, his lips quirked. "Not the done thing, having the latest fuck show up to the family reunion?"

El's head moved, a repeated heavy drag of hair over the pillow. "It's not worth the risk for a corpse."

Sands' smile twisted higher at one corner. "You know, El, some people might think that sounds a little odd, coming from a man who spent so many years shooting bad guys in the name of dead people."

The pause spread and stretched through the room, till he almost thought El wasn't going to answer.

"Sometimes I wish I'd known what I know now when I was twenty-five. But then I would never have met Carolina, and my Loída would never have been born. And then I think if she'd never lived, she wouldn't have had to die that way."

"So you're not gonna go all romantic on me, wax poetic about how the time with the love of your life was worth all the rest of that shit?"

"It was for me," El said, quiet, with no hesitation. "Sometimes I wonder how they would value it."

"El, you were being shot at when you met your wife." Sands made no effort to hide his amusement. "She knew what she was getting into, she could've bailed any time. And it was her choice to get herself knocked up too, since I'm assuming you weren't both just idiots."

"Oh, we were idiots," El said, bitterness thick and instant, dripping like molasses. "We were stupid enough to think we were safe."

"Well, that's an oversight of an entirely different kind."

"It's not something I'll forget again." El tipped his head to look directly up at Sands. "What about you?"

"What about me?"

"Is there somewhere you'd want to be taken?"

There was genuine curiosity in El's voice, and Sands huffed air, amused. "Me? Hell, doesn't matter to me, just toss some rocks over me where I die. But don't use my name, it's more fun to leave people guessing."

"That part I knew." Something of El's natural humour back behind the words, thank fuck; Sands didn't have the patience to deal with prolonged doses of morose Mariachi.

He hitched himself down the bed, his head flopping back onto the pillow. "Good. So you got rid of the sidekicks by bitching about needing your sleep, and if you didn't mean it, I sure as Christ do."

"I meant it." El was still smiling.

"Then you should quit whining and try it."

"I would, but I seem to be lying on your automatic."

"That's not too practical, El, I might want it."

"I'm not the one who put it there." The mattress dipped and creaked as El's weight shifted, slow.

"You weren't lying on it when I left it," Sands countered. He reached out to El's shoulder and pushed, rolling him onto his side while he retrieved the Beretta, the length of the silencer trapped by El's weight.

"So where are mine?" El asked as he eased back down.

"Where they always are." Mostly, that meant under the bed.

"They might need to be closer," El said, with some consideration.

Sands pulled one his own Sigs from its hiding place and shoved it under El's pillow. "Now shut the fuck up or I'll whack you round the head with it. I'm starting to think I preferred you unconscious."

"I know I preferred it." El was shifting again, slow, small movements, the futile attempts to get comfortable that Sands knew too well. "I think I need some more painkillers."

"Not if you're going to get yourself shot in the liver," Sands said, dry. "You're on strict rations. The doc seemed to think letting us kill you afterwards would have wasted his time."

"I'll work on making it somewhere else next time then." El finally stilled, no bets on how long for.

Sands was used to El wriggling the whole damn night through. It wouldn't disturb him now just because the reason had changed.

It was easier, though, when El was asleep and not tight with tension, a slow seepage of wrongness nibbling at the edges of Sands' mind.

El's hand stretched out over the sheets, fingers moving to rest on the denim at Sands' hip. Sands let himself relax under the touch, muscles loosening, and El in turn softened behind him.

The apartment was quiet, the background rustlings of the sidekicks faded into silence. The first sounds from beyond the wall, the light, running feet and slamming door, the neighbouring kids back from school already. High laughs and rushed Spanish chatter, damped into incoherence by the layers between. Casual, unforced, everything normal.

El slept, and finally Sands did the same.


	9. Chapter 9

Sands slept light and restless, the straps of the holsters dragged taut round his body when he moved, his shirt wrinkling into ridges beneath. When he gave up and let himself be awake, El was still out.

His jeans seemed unnaturally tight around his thighs, and it felt like his socks had melted right in between his toes.

El was right, he needed a goddamn shower.

He fished El's Glocks from under the bed and dumped them next to his pillow to go with the Sig. El would wake up if he needed them.

He brushed his teeth for the first time in over a day and flossed meticulously, because it was all-important that any future he might live through didn't involve cavities.

The water only trickled over his body from the feeble low pressure head, but it could be set somewhere just above cool as the soap stripped the sticky sweat from him. He scrubbed fingers through tangled hair that felt even worse than his skin did, and there were times it was useful not to know exactly what was swilling away down the drain.

He tied his damp hair back out of his face, and with a clean T-shirt pulled on beneath the holsters, his brain was finally starting to liven up and anticipate the potential for... something, anything to happen.

When he came out, El was waiting by the door.

He missed things every single time he took a fucking shower.

"About time," Sands said. "You'll need to change the dressing."

"Not my first thought," El said, dry. "It was get up or wet the bed."

"Good choice." Sands swung back into the bathroom, pulling bandage rolls and dressing pads from the cupboards and setting them on the counter, because El wouldn't appreciate doing much in the way of bending or stretching right now.

El's bare feet padded up behind him. "I can do the rest myself." Brush of loose cloth on Sands' wrist as El reached past him for a clean towel - El had hung a shirt over his shoulders, but hadn't tried to wriggle his arms through the sleeves.

Sands tipped his head El's way, with a quirked smile. "Well, I wasn't planning to stay for your shower, I just dried off." And El wouldn't be feeling like a round of cubicle-contorted sex for quite some time. "If I hear a crash, I might come looking."

"If you don't, somebody will." So El's low-key humour was sticking around. Nice to know he hadn't lapsed right back into morbid.

"Then I'll just take it easy and leave the lapdogs in charge for a while."

El's fingers skated light over Sands' arm as he left the bathroom.

Sands fired up the laptop in the bedroom and skimmed through the news channels. He found only puff pieces on the murder of a prominent local businessman, nothing with El's name on it. Somebody was putting some real investment into keeping that part quiet. Since this was Mexico City and the 'victim' was significantly rich, it merited a few paragraphs in the national websites too, but they were even less revealing. Nothing about possible suspects, nothing on police leads, and absolutely nothing publicly connecting Salinas to unauthorised income.

He ran the standard international checks – Morales was several points ahead in the polls now, and the momentum was all his. The rest was just a matter of counting down to election day.

By the time they made it back to Bolivia, the country would have a new president, and a whole new set of politicos for Sands to tap into and play with. It was going to be fun.

Sands was still assuming El would be coming back with him, ready to pick up exactly as before. Well, it did seem like the only assumption worth working with.

The thin background patter of the shower had stopped a while back, and El hadn't reappeared in his low-level radar. Sands angled his head, tilting past the dullness of his earphone and the exterior traffic buzz, and caught the edge of a quick crackle of plastic.

El was working on the dressings then. He was taking his time over it, but he'd be taking his time over a lot of things for a while.

Sands wouldn't have appreciated any offers of help, and he didn't intend to hand them out either.

He flipped the laptop fast through a few other sites – traffic just in case, American news, currency exchange rates. The US dollar wasn't stretching as far in some circles as it used to, and while some of the people he dealt with were too stupid to know that, others certainly would.

He was still listening when the fabric shift came from the bathroom, the near-silent touch of bare feet from beyond the door. Feet that were steady, forcibly so; slow, tentative, and even.

Sands wasn't the only one who'd noticed them, Fideo's short strides pattering from further along the hallway to catch up. "Hey El, you know most people would stay in bed a few days after surgery."

"Most people don't run around getting shot in the first place," Sands drawled, his fingers tapping through to another site. El wouldn't be staying put anywhere, and hinting that he should was as pointless a waste of existence as any of the hours the drunk spent dipping into a bottle.

"I think they might have the right idea. It seems to hurt more every time." The truth of it was there in El's voice, bare under the expected wry humour.

Sands tipped his head, angled up to El, soft tug of plastic at his ear as the cord pulled tight. "But it doesn't stop you. Not for long."

The wood of the door jamb creaked under El's shifting weight. "I thought I would stop once. I meant it."

"And then you fell right back into it, with just one little prod."

El shrugged, cloth rubbing loose against the frame. "If I stop, I die, and I want that less."

"If you don't want to die, don't try so hard," Fideo said cheerfully. "And come and eat now you're up, Lori's already fighting the microwave for you."

"So why are you standing around? You need to rescue the food before it shrivels up and dies." El's voice flipped right back to match Fideo's mood.

"I'm going, I'm going. I just thought you might like an invitation first."

"Don't worry, we'll invite ourselves when we smell food," El called after the footsteps pattering away down the hall.

Sands set the laptop to sleep, pulled the earphone away and dropped it to the desk. "I think I'd eat anything right now, even if the brat cooked it."

"You wouldn't say that if you'd ever tried his cooking." El's smile was still there, but his voice was tight again behind it, with another creak of the door frame. "I'll wait here a few minutes, till Fideo and Lorenzo stop arguing over how to reheat things."

Sands pushed his chair back, fingers brushing over his watch. He took the pills from his pocket, shaking out the right numbers. "Then swallow these while you're standing there, you're due again." He wasn't, not for almost another hour, but that wouldn't kill him when bullets wouldn't.

He pressed the bottles into El's pocket as he passed him in the doorway. "I'm sure the doc wrote the instructions on there."

El's fingers were at his wrist, stopping him before he pulled away. "Thank you."

Sands shrugged, the movement tugging his hand back. "They're your drugs." Sands would have shot anyone who tried to keep control of his supply after the Day of the Dead.

He headed off down the hallway, leaving El to make his own way without an audience. Sands planned on waiting for the food to arrive in the living room, and blocking out the inanities from the kitchen – he'd gotten more than enough experience at siphoning the sidekicks' relentless chatter into background noise.

The chatter was definitely there, but so were the scents, spreading through the room on waves of heated air; it was the same dense spicy-cheese-tomato mix he'd dined on earlier, but Sands wasn't feeling too particular, and he slumped into the sofa to wait.

The food smells strengthened a minute or so later, carried along with the kid's footsteps. Footsteps that stopped dead right around the doorway. "Where's El?"

The kid's words were terse, but it felt more like habit than accusation. "Swallowing pills, if he's feeling smart," Sands said, deliberately blasé. "I'm sure he'll turn up eventually."

Air sucked in sharp and fast, but whatever the kid was going to say didn't make it past the brain filter. At least there was evidence he had one he was occasionally willing to use.

"Yeah, he gets that way," the kid said finally. His feet came the rest of the way in, and he slapped a plate down on the low table next to Sands. "Sorry about the tamales, they kinda dried up on me."

"That's because you left them in there for five minutes," the dipso said, walking in with an extra layer of odours, more onion and a darker, richer, meat. "You couldn't expect them to live." He dumped some of his own offerings alongside Lorenzo's. "Try the picadillo, I got to it first."

Picadillo wasn't one of Sands' favourites – no skill or subtlety in the preparation, just throw everything together in a pan and fry it fast – but it would take a lot of abuse and survive it. It could have been invented for the age of batch cooking and freezing. And Sands was goddamn hungry.

He picked up the second plate, exploring with careful fingers. He found the picadillo sitting in a pile with tortillas on the side, and opted not to take the messy, dripping option for food, keeping the two separate and using a fork for the meat.

El's footsteps came towards the door some five minutes later, slow and halting along the hallway. His bare soles padded irregularly with the pain, the stretch of muscles on the side with a bullet hole more cautious, more hesitant. The sidekicks ignored the approaching feet too, keeping right on with their mutual accusations till El stepped through the doorway.

"Good thing you're here, El, Lori was about to go looking and force feed you," the dipso said.

"Hey, you know me, I make a promise, I keep it." The kid's voice glowed bright, the laser beam pinpoint that flipped on instant whenever El was in the room. "And like you wouldn't have been right behind me."

"Well, I'm here, and I'm fine," El said, smiling. "You can even watch me eat." El lowered himself into the sofa alongside Sands, weight settling slow, careful, nothing close to his usual relaxed thump and sprawl.

"Oh, sure, you're fine, we can see that." The kid could somehow still manage to roll his eyes through that cheerful voice, a trait that had to be unique. He was up and handing El a plate that smelled like the picadillo.

"Maybe not right now," El admitted ruefully. "But I will be."

"Probably." Satisfaction with El's confession heavy in the grin as Lorenzo flopped back into his chair. "One thing I can say for sure, El, as long as the psycho sticks around, you won't need to spring your cash for a guard dog."

Sands flashed teeth the kid's way, wide and fleeting. "I'm single-minded."

"Then you're the only man I've met who can be single-minded about five things at once," El said, his elbow touching light against the sleeve of Sands' jacket while he scooped up food.

"I'm the only man you've met who does a lot of things, El," Sands replied easily, letting his tone add the slide of sexual connotation.

The brat for sure wouldn't miss a forty watt innuendo from three city blocks away, but he didn't pause or falter at it. "And thank fuck for that, I wouldn't wanna find too many blind guys running round the streets waving guns the way you do," he said, his tone sticking with the light and breezy.

Sands wasn't aware the kid had ever used the word 'blind' to his face before, instead of couched, sly references to the things he couldn't do.

"Neither would I," El said, his hand there flat on the sofa between them, the edge touching against Sands' thigh. "I would only trust the one."

"You're a fool to trust anybody," Fideo said, superficially as cheerful as anything that has gone before, but something of an edge lurked beneath it.

El tipped his head towards the chairs across the room. "Even you?"

"Even us," the dipso confirmed, his words underlined by the familiar scrape of a bottle top. "People can be tricked, can betray without meaning to."

"Hey, you speak for yourself," Lorenzo protested. "I'm smart enough to spot a scheming bastard out to dig the dirt, even if you're not."

"Are you sure about that?" Sands asked, dropping his voice low and slow. "You'd want to be very sure."

"I spotted you, didn't I?" the kid said, grinning wide. "Called you out as a psycho inside a flat minute."

Sands angled his eyebrows lightly, the rest of his face expressionless. "I wasn't ever trying to hide anything."

"What would you hide?" El said, and his hand was there again, the light pressure that barely touched. "You are who you are. We all are." His voice set flat, and Sands could feel that gaze settling over the sidekicks as it had coiled around him across a table in Culiacán.

"Yeah, we are," Lorenzo said, almost matching his tone. "And most of us don't advertise so hard, it attracts less trouble."

"Well, when El here's such a magnet for armed wannabe assassins, really, my own small contribution barely seems to register." Sands tugged the corners of his mouth into a quick smile that didn't part his lips.

"If you want to be as famous as me, you'll need to work a little harder at it." El's soft humour was right back, flowing smooth between the bites of food.

"I think maybe the gringo's too smart for that," Fideo said. "Sorry, El, you'll always be the first target."

"And only myself to blame for it, don't tell me, I know," El said, smiling.

"Well, at least you got that part nailed in," the kid said, catching the mood again. "Now it's just the rest of your idiot ideas we gotta fix."

"Like you don't have so many. Maybe we should work on yours first."

"Me? Hey, I live a life of charm and carefree innocence, what's to bitch about that?"

The conversation was deteriorating again, Sands' fork screeching lightly as he circled it, and he set the empty plate back on the table alongside him. "Well, as charming as this discourse has been, I've got a Beretta to clean." It had the unarguable benefit of being true, if not something Sands had been looking forward to. It was close on thirty-six hours now, and the residue would have baked and set nicely along the barrel and in the action as it cooled.

El's head tipped to smile at him as he stood. "Don't use all the oil, I'll be there when I finish eating."

Sands raised eyebrows at him. "You'd better be. A bullet hole doesn't mean you get to ditch it all on me."

He'd end up cleaning half of El's mini arsenal whatever. He always did, because the alternative was the scrubbing lasted half the night when Sands was trying to sleep, though he left the shotgun to the attentions of its owner, just to make a point.

He stopped by the kitchen to make himself a coffee, the rattling cupboards and boiling water enough to be sure El knew where he was. El would carry on eating a while, turn up and join him when there was actual work going on.

The coffee smelled too fucking good. Smelled like evenings with ideas and papers and information, like sitting up too late as plans formed and swirled, were rejected and settled on.

He swallowed half the mug back, hot, took the rest of the pot with him to the room.

Sands stretched his legs out across the floor, his back against the bed, and started with the Beretta, the one from the left holster, the one he'd used. He wasn't in the mood for a general clean of the others, not with five or six of El's selection to add to the list. Stripping this particular model still wasn't pure habit, took a little thought behind the slide of his fingers to find the releases, and El's footsteps were there as he laid out the last of the sections in front of him.

El settled onto the bed alongside him, knee at Sands' shoulder. "Lorenzo means well."

Sands tipped his face up to El with quirked lips. "Decided to make an effort, has he? Treat me like one of the guys?"

"Something like that," El smiled. Metal clicked and sprung free beneath his fingers.

Sands handed him a solvent swab and a couple of sheets of newspaper. "Don't get grease on the bed."

El didn't say anything more, concentrating on the movements of cleaning the Glocks, finding the position and arrangement of materials that worked out best for his sliced up muscles. The cleaning was mindless, a twenty-year ritual of patches and brushes, and Sands tracked the subtly altered and slowed patterns above his shoulder, El's body language the purest barometer of his level of pain, because El sure as fuck wouldn't tell him.

Sands had his own questions lingering about the kid, but they were best asked when El didn't have so many distractions, when he was resting as drugged and comfortable as he was gonna get, instead of twisting past the objections of his muscles, screaming from under his dressings.

Best asked when the cleaning was done, when El was finished wriggling into sheets and pillows; when Sands had washed the cordite from his hands and flossed the onion from his teeth and was sitting upright on the bed alongside him with a smoke hanging familiar between his fingers.

"So what's the thing with you and the kid?"

"Thing?" El's tone slashed his raised eyebrow across Sands' mind.

So he was gonna have to get explicit to stop El wriggling away from it. "He'd stick to you like a leech if you let him. You like him, but you keep on peeling him off and flicking him away into the weeds. And don't feed me that camel shit about protecting him from your bad rep, because that's a part of it, but you don't kick the dipso down so hard."

He'd figured El would take his time over his answer, fixing the words up just right, but they came fast and casual, openly resigned. "He wants to model himself on me. I'm not a good role model."

Sands smiled, stretching his lips long and lazy. "Well, no, but I wouldn't be kicking the pretty smitten boy away from my bed, so you're an obvious improvement over me."

Little Lori really didn't have a thing for El that way, but El didn't bother pointing it out. "You can't stand the 'pretty boy'," he said, light.

"That's not to say I wouldn't fuck him. Might make it more fun." Sands wound the humour back, his voice setting flatter, harder. "But you don't need to worry about him turning out like you. The kid's too motivated by money for that."

"So he has both our flaws, instead of only mine. You're not making me feel better."

Sands' mouth curled tight at the corners. "Not my job, El, I just sell the facts."

El tipped his head back to the wall, the soft solidity of bone and the rough sweep of hair over plaster. "He became a killer much younger than I did. I wonder how anyone gets through that and keeps their soul."

"Oh, the kids take to it real well." Sands flashed a full smile, all teeth. "It's hardly a coincidence that all those gangs stirring up their little African war zones make a habit of recruiting twelve-year-olds, get them used to killing before they start to think about it too much. Statistically, you're the one more likely to have gotten burned out by it all." He lifted his eyebrows high, quirked the edge of his mouth. "If it hadn't come so naturally to you, of course."

El shook his head slow. "I'm not sure so it didn't burn me out."

Sands tipped his head to give El the full stare of the lenses. "Well, I'm sure. You might have been irritated by all the little lifestyle inconveniences that come as part of the package, but the quiet hidey hole was always a deliberate decision for you, not a reaction to the nightmares giving you the screaming heebies."

"I have nightmares," El said softly.

"Sure you do." Sands kept his tone entirely reasonable – as if anyone who'd spent more than a week in El's bed could miss that he had some bad dreams. "But not the kind where you see the faces of the people you killed, the moment you killed, the shock and the blood and the daytime flashbacks." He lowered his voice, let the darkness creep through it with a soft smile. "People like you and me, El, our nightmares are all about the people we didn't kill soon enough."

El rustled faintly, the new, slower version of his shrug. "The dreams are still there. Maybe why doesn't make such a difference."

"It makes every difference," Sands said, brisk, unshakeable. "It's the difference between you sitting here having a rational conversation about it, and an extended stay in a quiet room with soft walls and no razors." He curled his lips, pressed together close in flat humour. "The wrap-around jacket wouldn't be a good look on either of us."

"A lot of people would disagree," El said, easy shift to match Sands' tone.

"A lot of people are boring, spineless cowards who won't twitch a pinkie to shape the world the way they want it, so their opinions are meaningless." Sands drawled the words out in exaggerated disinterest.

El shook his head. "The voices count for something. That's why we earned our democracy."

Sands curved his eyebrows high and mocking. "El, surely you don't fall for that 'one man's vote can change the world' crock of camel shit? The only people who make a difference are the ones who tell the herd what to think." He sucked deep on his cigarette and tipped his head El's way, angling the smoke from the corner of his mouth in a smooth stream. "Hell, you would have died in jail years ago if you didn't have such a good publicity machine. Hundreds of people could have turned you in, but they don't, because you're the local folk hero. You and I both know it's so much snake oil, but the masses like the better story."

El turned back to face Sands directly, his words warm and unruffled. "People want to believe what gives them hope."

"Exactly," Sands said, smiling wide. El always responded best to the personal angles. "Feed them the right hook and they're ready to swallow any old BS."

This time, El didn't bother to disagree, only wriggled and shifted, rearranging himself stretched out long across the bed.

Not that it was so much of a victory, Sands considered, reaching for the ashtray on the nightstand. He'd started out probing El about the kid, and ended up talking fucking politics.

It was almost worse that he was pretty sure the diversion wasn't deliberate, just the tangled salmagundi of wires in El's head. Tug on one, and you never knew what the hell else would come knotted to the other end.

It was one of the annoying paradoxes about the Mariachi. He could irritate the crap out of Sands with his stubbornness and irrationalities, but if he was entirely predictable, Sands would have tired of him long ago.

Sands had more than enough self-awareness to realise that his tastes and his choices weren't always ideal for his own best interests, but what the hell, better dead than bored.

He set the ashtray back down and considered steering things around to the kid again, but El's breathing was already sliding into a pattern alongside him, rhythmic and slow. The drugs would do that.

Himself, he'd been napping through most of the goddamn day, and he probably wasn't going to get too lucky with the sleep thing now.

The sounds of the world flowed in over El's breath, the drone of the traffic on the arterial a few blocks over, the chatter of TV from the next apartment muffled beyond the wall. No trees round this apartment to encourage the surging background of bugs he'd hated in Acapulco, just the irregular coughs and rattles of dying engines in nearby trucks and cars, Mexico still flowing late into the evening.

Sands sat with his back to the pillow and his head to the wall, drawing smoke through his lungs and details through his head as he listened to the city outside the glass, to the passing of the night.


	10. Chapter 10

If El was good enough to drag himself out of bed for dinner, he was good enough to get the hell out of the apartment, and the next day Sands relocated them all to a hotel. It was one of the places they'd scoped and rejected for the intended meet with Salinas. Not flash, but not too cheap, and not too far – even with the drugs, El wouldn't be feeling like a lengthy trip. That hadn't stopped El from hauling a doped up Sands half way across the country when it suited him, but Sands wasn't looking for an opportunity to repay.

As a bonus, Sands figured this way he'd get a little more time to himself without the sidekicks hanging around, but the mariachis banded together and insisted on rooms with connecting doors, just in case. That meant the three of them stuck to the familiar pattern of congregating in one room for endless sessions of tedious prattling. Sands took the only victory he was going to get by insisting on having the door locked when he didn't want to be disturbed.

Lorenzo disposed of their been-around-the-block-a few-times-too-many-now Chevy, switching it out for another battered vehicle of dubious providence, but otherwise they stayed inside, keeping out of sight. They had food delivered from a variety of places so nobody outside the hotel staff figured out they were set for the long-stay package. Sometimes they sent Fideo to collect their orders instead, as the least likely to be picked out of a crowd, and he came back reporting the area clear, no obvious watchers.

Sands didn't even get out to the end of the hall, his days spent trapped with laptop and radio and the brain-sucking zombies that inhabited daytime TV, and his boredom level was spiralling by the hour. He turned his attention back to some of those old, lingering questions about the sidekicks, passing time lazing quiet in the background beneath the games and the chatter, testing theories against observation. Well, he had to take his entertainment where he could find it.

And it was still worth his while trying to figure out exactly what angle the kid was planning to hit from when they announced they were leaving. After a week, El was a long way from healed, but he was a whole lot more mobile.

Sometimes the mariachis sat around and played cards to waste the hours beneath their chatter. Sometimes they plucked at their guitars instead, rolling through tune after tune or playing around with whatever patterns of notes dropped into their heads. Those times the music wandered oddly, and while the tempo stuck tight, the mood wasn't always headed the same way from each player. They didn't sing too often, thank fuck, not since the evening some neighbour got pissed and banged on the walls. Now they mostly kept it to the early afternoon, when there was nobody much around to annoy but the cleaners pushing carts up and down the hallways.

Sometimes they stole Sands' laptop.

It always started with El, which was fine, but then the sidekicks would invite themselves to join him, which was not so much, even though any files Sands considered important were in hidden folders locked down with passwords.

Sands didn't think El had spent a whole lot of time online before the two of them became acquainted – during most of the onward march of home computing, El had been hiding away in his desert dustbowl, where cable and wireless weren't exactly standard features of a des res – but regular exposure to technology had apparently convinced him of its benefits. El still wasn't an avid user, though, and he'd wander away once he had what he wanted, leaving the sidekicks to poke around out of boredom.

"Hey, El, you seen the stats on the new Para Lite Hawg? Forty-five sub-compact, ten plus one with a tac rail and only a three inch barrel."

El was stretched out along the bed, and he didn't bother to go take a look. "Forty-five is too much power for a small handgun, they get snappy. They should make it a nine millimetre with a few more rounds."

"Reviews say the grip's better, easier to handle," Fideo said, huddled up next to Little Lori by the screen.

"Have they fixed the reliability too?" Sands drawled past the rim of his coffee cup. "The old P10 had a nasty little reputation for feed jams. Not something I'd want to bet my life on." He stopped huffing breath over the liquid, and took a cautious sip. It flowed over his tongue with just the right burn, but he was wishing for the thousandth time he had his old AeroPress here. Coffee tasted like shit out of styrofoam.

"Never picked up a Para new," Lorenzo said with a grin. "Always let somebody else work through the manufacturing glitches."

"But you won't find too many law enforcement types carrying Paras. They pay the extra couple hundred for a Glock or a Sig." Sands raised his eyebrows obvious above the cup. "I try to avoid direct disagreements with the police."

"Good habit." The kid tossed the words back over his shoulder, light. "So how about a lasergrip instead? You seen the Crimson Trace sights for those Glocks of yours, El?"

"If I didn't know better, I'd think you were trying to tell me I can't shoot straight," El said, dry.

"Well, going by the latest evidence, maybe not," the kid teased. "When d'you last get your eyes checked? Maybe you could have used a little help."

"I could have used a few less people shooting at me," El said. "That would have been helpful."

"Or maybe you should just stay further away," Fideo said, fingernail tapping on the touchpad. "Take a look at the latest Leica range-finder here – it's the same inside as the 1200, but this one fits in your pocket."

"That would work, with a bazooka to get all those annoying walls out of the way." El's voice clung to his deadpan humour, but he was interested enough in that piece of kit to slide off the bed and check out the site.

Sands was more interested in the kid's newly-developed tolerance, and just how far it could be pushed. Among other things, the entertainment level over the last week had dropped off in an unfortunate way.

He left his experiment till the drunk had passed out for the evening, and El was tucked away in the bathroom, cleaning up before bed. El was still sleeping more because of the drugs.

Sands stretched himself relaxed over the armchair, wriggling back into it to swing Lorenzo's eyes around his way, and lighting himself a cigarette for that extra touch of provocation. "Shouldn't you be trying to talk him out of playing with guns, instead of encouraging him?" He breathed smoke out slow through his nose, dipped his head a little so he could almost be staring over the glasses. "Isn't that what a 'friend' would do?"

Lorenzo only shrugged. "He wouldn't do it if he didn't want to."

Sands smiled crooked around the filter between his lips. "That doesn't stop you lecturing the dipso when you feel like it."

Lorenzo swung the chair around away from the laptop, to look straight at Sands. "El likes it as much as you do, as much as we all do," he said after a pause. "He just won't say it."

Sands wasn't sure they all liked what they did quite equally; he was certain they didn't all like it in quite the same way. But it was interesting to see those flashes of a brain that came through when the kid flipped the off switch on his temper.

Sands thought the kid might actually be starting to like him, instead of just tolerating him. Well, that would fix itself fast enough - Little Lori still hadn't figured out how this was gonna work.

Sands didn't bother himself with the alco-drain's opinion; if the trend held, he'd drink himself right back into a stupor inside a couple of days and not give a goat's balls what went on around him. But poking into the why of that was at least a little more brain-stimulating than the TV zombies.

There wasn't much point asking the dipso direct. When he was half-way sober, he was defensive of his personal back-story, and when he was a few bottles down, he passed out. He never turned into one of those babbling, rambling drunks – if he did, El would likely have ditched him years back, and if not, Sands would have killed him already. Asking the kid wouldn't work either – Lorenzo didn't like him quite that much.

That left Sands with one other source to tease at, though El wasn't always entirely forthcoming either.

Sands waited till El finished brushing his teeth before he led the conversation around that way, because giving El an excuse to stop and think before he answered was always the wrong choice.

"So what's his deal with the bottle, anyway? What exactly is he running from?"

El half-turned, still patting at the water round his mouth with the hotel facecloth. The towels in this place were cheap and worn, but that wouldn't bother El. "Why do you assume he is?"

Sands lifted an eyebrow. "Everybody you know's running from something, El. Even that priest confessor of yours back in muletown was hiding from a world he didn't want to know about, from the guys who'd shoot one another for money." He twisted his lips, obvious and wry. "He must've been ecstatic when you showed up at his door."

El swung back to the sink, to the mirror that wouldn't have hidden him from anyone, and didn't hide him from Sands. The facecloth dropped to the counter with a soft flump. "What makes any of us who we are? His father liked to drink too much, his life has been difficult, and now he does the same."

"So that's how it is for you? Everybody doomed by their genetics, no free will?"

"No." El didn't answer slow, but the words were careful all the same. "I'd say more that we all live with what we've learned."

"So what have you learned?"

"To survive."

Sands raised his eyebrows, exaggerated and deliberate. "That's it? Will the last man standing please turn out the lights? Nothing more edifying to add?"

El reached out, hanging the facecloth back onto the hook on the wall. "There's more, but... that seems to be most of it."

And that was most of what Sands got that night too, because El wouldn't be sucked in any deeper.

The days in the hotel crept by with no sign of pursuit.

The kid started slipping out for food sometimes instead of the drunk. Sands was left with the walls of the two rooms, unseen and mostly untouched, the trap in his head as confining as the one around his body.

The days merged into the passing of weeks, quiet and slow and frustratingly similar.

A few weeks was more than long enough for Sands. And long enough for certain lingering loose ends to be cleared up.

He chose his evening for the weather, for the direction of the breeze, not too strong, and tied his timing to the sun. Sands had hung out his strongest 'do not disturb' signs through the late afternoon, and the mariachis' voices rippled through the door behind him, crashing and overlapping and settling back into murmur.

He pocketed the pay-as-you-go he'd had the dipso pick up for him on one of his food trips, and let himself out of the hotel room. He wasn't enthusiastic about his visibility for this part, but he didn't want interested ears listening in on his end of this conversation, and he sure as fuck didn't want any unfortunate background chit-chat leaking over the line the other way.

El would hear him leave, and be curious, but he wouldn't interfere.

Sands knew a little about the area round this hotel from their earlier investigations, enough to know where to head for and to make it there with the cane. He turned west, into the sun, the soft rays still warming over his cheek along the length of the street. Easy to follow the herd for a few blocks, crossing intersections when the people around him did, guided to avoid obstacles as much by feet and voices as by the cane. The cane just told the cattle on the streets not to go crashing into him, because he wasn't gonna be moving out of their way.

He headed south now, the sun fading from his skin in the long shadows of the buildings, and when the breeze stirred again he caught trees and green and open space through the ever-present burn of gasoline. He let the air tug him on, adjusting the rough street map in his head to the reality as he walked, detail and numbers adding layers, depth, to keep the trip back to the hotel simple when his nose would be no help.

The park was growing quieter as the sun lowered, most of the feet headed the other way past Sands, the natural distrust of the human species for deepening gloom.

Sands didn't give a bat's fart if it was dark in there, and that had been almost as true when he could still see.

The breeze steered him towards a grove of bigger trees, leaving the path for soft grass over hard soil, tracking the thick rustle of leaves with each sweep of air. The cane found him a good thick trunk among them, Sands invisible from the path now if anybody else was roaming the park at sunset, and his ears would know if someone was around.

He peeled off his glove, propped a cigarette between his lips, cupping a hand round the lighter as he touched it to the end and flicked up the flame. Heat flared on his skin, that bit too close and biting, but he sucked the burn into the smoke before he pulled his palm away.

The best lies worked because they were the truth, with all the evidence there to back them up.

He flipped open the cell and dialled the number.

He didn't get the silent delay this time, only the answer. "Figured it might be you. You're later than I thought."

"I wanted to give you plenty of time, make sure I'm getting the right answers."

"I got answers for you. Not sure if they're what you'd call the right ones." Her tone, light and easy, didn't much care what he thought.

"So spill and find out."

It wasn't going to go that fast, and the smile in her voice was no surprise. "You're not the only one who wants to know things, Sands. And since I'm doing you a favour here, I thought you might like to give a little in return."

Sands didn't like to give anything, but this was the price for dealing with Foreman. The smarter they were, the harder they'd screw you when they had you dangling.

He widened his own smile across the line. "What's your line of interest, sugarcheeks?"

Foreman's grin grew just as bright in return, and she'd always had the orthodontist-special teeth behind those barely-painted lips, stretching and parting in his head. "There's a lot of talk doing the rounds up here – I wanna know how much of it's for real."

Sands laughed, pure amusement he had no reason to hide. "I'm not sure there's a whole lot you could have heard that _wouldn't_ be the truth, or close enough to it."

"You really ran some deal with that headcase vigilante out there? Hit the old Barillo clan, took out that Honaker fuck?"

Sands shrugged, the bare disinterest of old news filling his words. "A lot of people were annoyed at the both of us. It seemed prudent to pool resources until they were gone."

"Yeah, you finally found somebody else who matches your talent for pissing people off." She laughed across the line, genuine, or real close. "So which one of you actually killed the devious old bastard?"

"Oh, that was all El," Sands said, breezily. "Something of a short fuse, that one, not always the most reliable ally. I wanted Honaker alive a week or two longer myself, while he supplied me with the same information you're about to give up."

"So that's why you ditched him," she said, amusement tangling with curiosity, rich and thick across the line.

"I departed for less hostile climes," Sands said simply, smoke slipping out with the words. The best lies worked because they were the truth.

"So did you ever find out who he really was?" Foreman was way too smart to fall for the folk hero bullshit, but too persistent not to poke at a good mystery.

"He didn't say, and it didn't seem to matter." It really didn't, which was almost odd; Sands was a compulsive gatherer of information, and it should have been munching on his toes this whole time. But what the hell, he already knew most of what there was to know about El, a name wouldn't give him anything more.

And Foreman was just too fucking smart not to catch the anomaly. "You must be slacking off some, Sands, that doesn't sound your style at all." Her voice had dropped darker, instincts pricked, circling and seeking.

"I was planning to use his skill, not ghost his bio." Sands drawled the words long, bored. "There were a few other things tying up my lines of inquiry at the time."

"Yeah, I guess you had enough going down to keep you busy." Her voice light again, the hunter gone, and she bought it because that was the truth too.

"That's all you're asking this time, a little local colour for the prize?" It might not be the wisest move, taunting Foreman before she leaked his info, but Sands made a habit of playing it smart, not wise. "Your price is dropping like a junkie whore's, sweet cheeks." If it pissed her off, well, it would steer her back the way he wanted her.

But he got nothing from her except that crooked smirk she loved to turn on when she was winning. "Sorry, Sands, but I don't think you've got a whole lot left to offer me."

And that was an interesting reveal right there, even while the barb caught at his throat like cheap tequila. They really hadn't tabbed onto anything he'd been doing the last couple of years, outside of the flashiest episodes. "Maybe you just need to know the right questions to ask."

"Maybe." And the absence of any other follow-up meant she was growing as bored with the point-scoring part of this little chat as he was.

"So if you're finished with your cross-examination now, how about I get my verdict?"

"The order to let him die came straight down from heaven," she said, her tone falling easily into report style, brisk, efficient, disinterested. She was talking about El Presidente, and too well versed to say it over the line. "Way above where I can track it. And it came down in that vague, generalised kind of a way."

He knew the style. Somebody made a passing remark to a subordinate who might just pass it down another rung. No details, no paperwork and no accountability, because if it ever back-tracked to bite them on the ass, hey, it was just a lazy joke, and damn, some idiot really acted on that? "So who's the first to put anything in writing?"

"Slater." Just two steps up the staircase, the boss's boss. "No specifics, no names, just get someone in Mexico to keep a watch on Barillo. Drug guy's getting too cocky, too ambitious. Next step's Rothman who pegs you, because you're already in Culiacán and sitting on a couple of sources." Yeah, stuck on that dead end corruption detail that had been boring the fuck out of him for more than five months. That had been a big chunk of his decision to take the cash and go independent right there. "Copy says he left it to you whether to pull in the local AFN or run the watch alone."

And that could have swung either way, but when he'd run scans over the AFN he'd found someone interesting. Someone bored and bitter and perfectly corruptible, and as a side order, pretty enough to be worth a fuck.

Somehow he'd managed to miss the fact that the bitch had been corrupted from birth.

"That's all very nice to hear, candy lips, there's nothing like a bit of historical background to set things in perspective." The drawl was for show, and not designed to cover his impatience with the irrelevant sidetracking. "But what I really want to know is who the fuck sold me out?"

"Nobody."

His lips pinched hard and flat. "Meaning you don't know."

"Meaning nobody," she snapped. "There was no big conspiracy to hang you, Sands, there was just you. Maybe somebody decided to give you the extra rope down there just to see if you'd wrap it tight round your own neck, but the job was straight, and if you'd played it that way, it would've run the routine." Her voice lost the tight edge, softened into something close to sympathy. "The back-up headed in when you put out the call, but you weren't at the meet spot. And then the whole city went to hell, and looking for you just wasn't the main priority."

Sands didn't want anybody's fucking sympathy, and certainly not hers. "So now I get to be a legend all of my own, sugar cheeks." He plastered the smile on broad. "Spread the details anyplace you like, just don't go spilling the source."

She was laughing again, clear and real at his ear. "Like any fucker would believe me." Then the laughter was gone, but her humour still coloured the speculation. "Hey, since it's you we're talking about, they just might."

"So roll it on out there and find out," Sands said, his smile unconcerned. He wasn't giving her permission to do anything – he didn't have any influence over what she'd say, the choice was all her own, and that had been the gamble from the start. And if he picked up a little renewed interest from old Uncle Sam, well, the relatives would start looking in all the wrong places.

"Maybe I will," she said easily. It was laid out to be ambiguous, but Sands had something of a read on her, and if she planned on spreading it about, she'd either tell him that, flat fact, or fake him out like a thousand buck hooker. "Oh, and Sands, just one more thing."

"What's that, sweet thighs?"

"Don't call again." The phone clicked into silence by his ear as she hung up.

He flipped the cell closed, wiped it off with a cloth, and slid it into his pocket. He had no intention of getting back in touch.

Their working relationship had remained agreeable after he left his fingerprints on her little scheme only because he'd never put the pressure on. After this, she'd be poisonous, and that was never a pretty thing to watch. It had always been single use only material.

He shifted his weight into the wrinkled bark at his back, crossed his feet at the ankles and lit another cigarette, smoke trickling from his lips, sucked away with the breeze towards the buzz of the streets.

That was it. They were all dead, had been for two years, back on the Day of the Dead. No revenge to take, nothing left to chase.

And maybe it meant he could have gone back instead of running. If he really didn't have a personal nemesis waiting inside, and with most of the people who knew what he'd done conveniently dead, it wouldn't have taken too much effort to tidy up the dangling strings....

Gone back to disability and a pension, maybe a desk job typing up other people's slightly sensitive reports. Right.

He'd definitely grabbed himself the better end of that deal.

He dropped his smoke to the ground half-burned and screwed it into the grass with a boot tip. He didn't plan on decorating any particular stretch of lawn any longer then he had to, and the evening was already starting to cool for the walk back to the hotel, the last edge of sun sliding over his cheek as he moved out of the shade of the trees.

He dumped the cell in a trash can that got in the way of his cane a few blocks along.


	11. Chapter 11

Sands cornered Lorenzo on his way back from the breakfast run the next morning, waiting stretched against the wall in the stairwell, senses reaching for the right set of feet.

"You're going to rent us a car," he said, when the rustling bags stopped beside him. "El's good enough to drive now, and we're getting out." His little chat with Foreman had been more than long enough to triangulate on. She'd have it down to within five or ten city blocks.

"Screw the money-lending," the kid said with a quick grin. "He can rent his own car, but I'll drive him out to the office."

"Then anyone who gets a lead on our IDs can follow us right to the airport and onto the plane," Sands said, flat. "I don't want anybody looking for us leaving, at least not for a while, and you don't want them knowing where we went either."

"Yeah, I gotcha." The kid was serious himself now, the humour gone. "I'll take Fideo, pick one up later this morning when he's awake."

The single most predictable thing about the kid; he'd always protect El.

Sands tipped his head, smiled slightly beneath the glasses. "I thought you'd make more of a fuss about him running out on you."

"Figured it was coming." Lorenzo spoke neutral and unruffled. "He'd have vanished right after if he'd been able to." He walked on up the stairs past Sands, rattling plastic at him deliberately. "Get your ass inside. I don't know about you, but I wanna eat while it's hot."

Sands turned his head to track him, let him get a few steps ahead before he straightened to follow.

He liked that flash of the practical that escaped sometimes from under all the kid's attitude. If it showed up more often, he might actually be useful.

Breakfast was just the three of them, like most days. The sound of a shower came mid-morning, after Fideo had slept off last night's liquor, and he eventually oozed through the connecting door as close to sober as he would ever get.

The kid must have been thinking on the same lines, didn't even give the dipso the chance to flop into a chair. "Hey, if you're finally up, grab yourself a coffee and let's get on. I'm gonna go rent a car for El, I need you to bring the Nissan back."

"Hey yourself, Lori, give a guy a chance to wake up, won't you?" Fideo protested, instant and inevitable.

El shifted alongside Sands, head turning his way. "Time to go?"

Sands could almost hear Lorenzo lock rigid across the room.

"He didn't bother to fill you in on that part, huh?" The kid's words were thick with the suspicion that had been mostly absent the last few weeks. It really didn't take so much to bring it back.

"Sands knows when we need to move on," El said simply. "My own history with those choices isn't so good."

"You let him decide, every time, and you just follow along?" the brat demanded, high and sharp.

El only shrugged. "I have no home now. It doesn't matter so much where we go, when we go."

"Doesn't matter a thing, so long as you let us know where we can reach you when you get there, right, El?" Fideo asked cheerfully.

"Right," El said, smiling soft.

The kid actually stayed quiet that time and let the drunk's assessment hold.

The sidekicks headed out some thirty minutes later, turning up again around noon with a mid-sized Chrysler. It still smelled new inside, all thick plastic and cleaner. It probably screamed 'rental' from three blocks distant, but it was all they were going to get outside of having the kid lift another vehicle, and Sands didn't want to leave a stolen ride at the airport either.

There wasn't much to pack. They were still living the El Mariachi Mexico lifestyle, and pretty much the only things not in bags already were the clothes they were wearing.

El wasn't in an ideal state to be hauling luggage around yet, however much he might have protested it, and Fideo had settled in with his delayed morning bottle, so it was easy enough for Sands to arrange to be loading bags into the trunk alongside the kid. And from there to take him by the arm and steer him into the alleyway by the trash out back.

"What's going on?" The kid was asking questions, but he hadn't resisted the walk. A few weeks back he would have screeched the length of the street if Sands had tried to drag him off somewhere.

Sands reached into his pocket and held out a piece of paper he'd printed off from the laptop earlier. "This is a name and an address. You call the number before you go, and you tell him Stamford sent you. You do as the nice man says, and he'll get passports for you and the dipso, and then you leave. You do not go back to your place in Acapulco, or his, or anywhere else in this pox-pitted country. Got it?"

"What the fuck are you on about?" Lorenzo was confused, but he wasn't pissed about Sands handing out orders. Not yet anyways. "We're good here, we fixed everything."

"You haven't fixed a goddamn thing," Sands told him, flat. "You're screwed, both of you, you just haven't admitted it yet. Somebody already worked it out, connected the cookie crumb trail from you to him." He quirked his lip at one edge. "Do you think that's going to go away, the rumour that just lies down and dies peacefully one day like a convenient old grandma?"

"Who's gonna tell it?" Lorenzo said with a snort. "We killed the bastards."

"That approach never worked out so well for El," Sands reminded him. "And actually it went worse, for you. The only car we planned to leave on site was the one you lifted that morning, but you ended up ditching the Chevy in the killing fields too. All those weeks of driving it around - can you be sure you didn't leave any prints on it?"

"Who the fuck cares? The cops got no prints of mine, or Fideo's." The brat's trademark arrogance was swelling up to the high tide mark.

"Well, they do now, and right alongside some nice full sets of El Mariachi's." Sands let the first layer of smile slide over his face. "It really wouldn't be a good idea for you to be picked up and questioned about an unpaid parking ticket, not any more."

"So you're saying we gotta be careful." Some of the attitude was peeling away into resignation. "Okay, we can lay low a while, no problem."

The kid still wasn't bothering to read ahead. He had a set of wilful blinkers big enough for the goddamn Trojan horse.

Well, Sands was more than happy to enlighten him. "I'm telling you to take _him_" – gesturing up and back in the direction of the hotel room – "and get your asses the fuck out of this country and don't come back. I can recommend Caracas, though personally I don't give a fuck where you go, just as long as it's nowhere near me." His smile crept wider, and harder, thin curve of lip drawn across a face held deliberately flat. "And if you want to stay healthy, make sure you don't go calling El either."

"Fuck you!" Sands had that angle nicely covered, but he had to admire the kid's attitude, just a little. Most of the people who weren't too scared to get up in his face were just too stupid to see. "You can't threaten me, and you know it. You lay a finger on me, or Fideo, and El's gonna dropkick your ass hard off of the nearest cliff."

Sands didn't doubt it. El Mariachi had created himself as a mechanism for revenge, and he was good at it - there were tripwires in him Sands didn't ever plan to touch on. But the best part was that he never had to.

He stretched his lips slow, all the teeth in the tone instead of the smile. "I don't have to do a thing. It's amazing how rumours can get around, how the right words can go skipping along a predictable trail until they find themselves in the right ears. A passing comment made to one particular guy out of a thousand, and suddenly you find it's everywhere."

"I could do the same favour for you," Lorenzo snapped.

"But you won't." Sands said, relaxed and entirely confident. "Because anybody who comes to find me finds him too."

"And you're in deep enough you won't risk him finding out you set us up." The bite ran deep and satisfied through the kid's words. "So I guess we've got ourselves a stalemate."

The kid took a while to get going, but once his nose was pointed the right way, he could add a few things up on his own. Sands had figured as much if El considered him worth the time. "A genuine Mexican stand-off," he agreed. "But there's a little extra something you might want to take into consideration." He lowered his voice, speaking soft through his smile, still tacked wide. "If you suck him into any more of your ten cent troubles and get him killed, I can promise it won't come quick or easy for you."

He'd expected the threat to bring him more of the kid's whiplash self-righteous fury, but instead he got pure stillness. Stillness and words that came slow, thickened with curiosity. "And you think that means you get to start laying down orders on us, huh?"

"Think of it more as some strongly-felt advice. Telling you to get out of Mexico, that's for your own health." Sands smiled wide and bright beneath tilted eyebrows. "The El part, well, that's all about your health too."

"We're supposed to just up and leave our homes and our country because you say so?"

This conversation wasn't actually getting Sands anywhere, the brat tossing back the same protest every time, wrapped up in new packaging. The stubbornness the kid had obviously learned from El - pity he hadn't picked up on the sense too.

Time to change tack a little, before the stench of rotting food trapped in this alleyway finally made him gag. "Have you noticed anything about El during this little sojourn? Would you say he seems, maybe, a bit more relaxed than the last time you saw him?"

"Last time we saw him, he'd been drugged, kidnapped and gotten the shit kicked out of him because of some old friends of _yours._"

Well, that part was kind of hard to deny. Sands shrugged. "So go back further, the time before. I'll leave you to decide if any changes are down to the influence of my personal charm, or just getting clear of this piss-pot you live in."

"It works for El," Lorenzo admitted. His tone hardened again. "Doesn't mean it would work for us."

"But you'll do it anyway," Sands said flat, entirely confident now that he'd steered them onto a path the kid couldn't just argue away. "There are just too many good reasons to give a vacation a try out, and not enough good ones to stay."

The kid was eyeing him again through the pause, almost thoughtful. "And if we do, if we go, like you say, what are you getting out of it? You don't give a fuck what happens to us."

"With you gone, there's no reason left for El to ever want to come back to this putrid goat's colon of a country where everybody wants us dead," Sands said simply. It never did any harm to give an extra little push on those El-protective instincts the kid clung to so fiercely.

Movement, fast, and too close, movement flashing his way, but the kid was no threat to him, and Sands held himself still and almost casual as the paper was snatched from his hand. "We'll think about it," the kid said, brushing past Sands to head out of the alley in long, even strides.

Sands aimed a crooked smile at his back. "Are you going to go trotting off now and tell El all about this little chat?"

The kid paused, swivelled on his heel. "Why would I? You'd only deny it," he said in disgust.

Sands raised an eyebrow at him. "What would be the point in that?"

"You'd twist it all around so he wouldn't know whose take was real."

The kid said it like it was so very obvious, and Sands didn't bother to hold back the laugh. "He really won't appreciate you treating him like an idiot."

The kid paused before he answered, suspicion thick in his voice. "You're saying he doesn't trust you."

"He trusts me," Sands said easily. "He also knows me. Apparently the two aren't mutually exclusive."

"You really don't care if I tell him what a fuckcase you are."

Sands shrugged. "You're the only one who'd learn anything from it. He knows who I am - it hasn't made a difference by now, and it isn't going to."

"You saying he knew you'd pull this shit when he brought you?" Most of the anger flash had fizzled out of the kid now, and what was left was raw curiosity.

"Somehow I doubt he gave it any thought, occupied as he was with feeling guilty. But he won't be surprised when you fill him in."

"Then I guess there's still no point in me bothering, huh?" The kid took a few steps back towards the car, then stopped, turning to face Sands again. "You knew it was pointless, all of it, the whole time. So why the fuck did you play along instead of just saying it?"

Sands aimed him a bright flash of teeth. "Because it wasn't pointless, of course." He dialled it back to a quirk at the corner and raised his eyebrows. "Oh, it was pointless for you, tossing and twisting on the end of the line, desperately trying to get away from the inevitable, to get back to your nice house and cosy little lifestyle." He leaned in a touch closer, the extra emphasis for his words. "But El's repaid the debt now, gotten that last niggling obligation out of his system. So the next time you might call him up and recite some pathetic tale of woe, it shouldn't be too hard to persuade him he can protect you better by staying away."

That got him the quick, light feet and Lorenzo spitting right up in his face again. "You little fuck, you think you can piss with his head and keep him away from us?"

Sands stayed relaxed, unfazed, holding that faint tail of a smile. "It's what he thinks anyway, you accused him of it yourself. I'm just going to encourage it a little, that's all."

"And you'd do all this, fix the whole thing, send El out to get shot at, just so's you could get an angle on him."

Sands spent considerable time and effort on cultivating an image, and it was always good to know the image held, but the kid had been in the picture long enough that he really ought to know better. "El would have done what he did whether I signed off on it or not. It's easier to play along when it happens to get us both what we want."

"And what about when it doesn't?" Lorenzo asked, quiet now, all the aggression sucked back. "Have you even figured out which one of you's gonna get screwed the hardest when you decide you want different things?"

The kid turned again, heading back out of the alley towards the car, and this time Sands had no intention of stopping him.

It was an interesting final shot the kid had chosen to leave him with. The brat might actually have managed to learn a few things from him over the last months. Though he still had a hell of a long way to go if he thought anything he said was going to rattle Sands, instead of just amusing him.

Sands waited just a few more moments before he started walking to follow the kid back inside, only too happy to leave the alley alone with its trash.

The kid didn't say anything more to Sands as they loaded the last of the bags, and he joined in the routine mariachi chatter brightly enough back in the room. He tagged along when they went out to the car, El walking almost normal now, just something barely slow in the rhythm of his boots in Sands' head.

The dipso stayed inside, too soaked already to leave the armchair.

Sands settled into the passenger seat, into shaped foam curling up alongside his thighs, stretching his back along the curve of the rest. The car dipped and twitched as El slid in alongside him, the door closing with a low thunk. Soft whirr of a motor as El's window rolled down, and Sands was still feeling the panels for the controls to his own, the car hot and airless from the noon sun.

The kid leaned in, propping an elbow on the driver's sill. "Hey, El. You do know what you're doin', right?"

"Don't I always?" El smiled.

"No, you don't, you goddamn nut-job, look at the image you went and landed yourself with." The kid was rolling his eyes again. "That could do with a major fucking overhaul."

"I know what I'm doing." This time El's tone was taking the kid and question seriously. "Are you happy now?"

"As I'm ever gonna be, I guess." The kid backed off a little, straightening. "Take care of yourself, okay?"

He offered no aspirations for Sands' welfare, or any acknowledgement of his existence at all, but that suited Sands just fine.

"I will." El started the engine in a fine healthy purr of new mechanicals that Sands hadn't experienced in a while, and then they were moving away into the growing traffic growl.

The breeze from the window circled through the car, tugging strands of hair to tickle light along his cheek and chin. It brought with it the stench of fumes and dirt and pollution, the rumble and chatter of a city with too many people going about their mundane and pointless little lives, and Sands sucked it all in, let it dissolve into white noise through his head, because he was getting out and he wasn't ever coming back.

He was getting out of goddamn bitch-fucking Mexico. And this time he was doing it before the cunt-licker shoved him face down in the dirt to eat her dust.

El's hands moved over the wheel, fingers reaching to flick the turn signals, a constant low background of shifting sound alongside.

They were out, and they were getting the hell away, but Sands didn't believe for a second that his warnings would keep the brat from poking at El again. And he wanted to know what El's reaction was going to be. Oh, Sands would set his plans in place, responses styled to work around the various contingencies, but a little advance warning was never unwelcome.

El had said the sidekicks wouldn't be there when he died, and implied that Sands would be, and that seemed a reasonably flat statement of intent right there. But El had been known to change his mind a whole lot of times about a whole lot of things, Sands himself notably included. If Sands didn't know the details of exactly why El stayed around, he wasn't in any position to make sure those reasons didn't wander off along the way.

He waited till El had navigated his way through the Mexico maze, waited till the traffic moved thick in lanes either side, the arterial headed around the city taking them right to the airport. He really wouldn't want to get lost and miss the day's flights.

He reached inside his jacket for the pack of smokes in his pocket, slid a thumbnail under the edge of plastic wrapper. "So tell me, El, what is it you want?"

El's head swung his way, slow and curious. "How do you mean?"

"Well, if a guy's gonna go after what he wants, he's got to know what that is." The best way to get an answer from El was to keep it simple, impossible to misinterpret. "So what do you want now? Really want?"

There was an instant before he answered when El stilled, breathless, and Sands already suspected the question was a mistake. "Someone asked me that once before." The words came flat and empty. "I answered 'freedom'. I found out later that answer was wrong."

That someone just had to have been the wife. Everything always came back to her with the Mariachi. Oh, well, he'd already trailed his footprints all through the wet cement; no reason not to get his answers now or he'd just turned El all moody on him for nothing.

Sands shook a cigarette from the pack for himself, offered the rest in El's direction. "So what's the right answer?"

El shrugged, ignoring the carton. "There isn't one. What I wanted is gone, and now I don't want what I should."

Sands slid the pack back away into his pocket. "I didn't ask what you should want, I asked what you do."

He didn't get why El had to make a big, protracted drama out of it. Christ, it couldn't be that fucking hard. Sands would have had his answer inside a nanosecond, the one thing he wanted from his future more than anything.

He didn't want to be tied down and tortured. He didn't want anybody slicing into any part of him, or scraping anything out of him, not unless it was in a hospital under full anaesthetic, and preferably not even then. And he wanted his teeth to last him too, because he wasn't sure he could ever sit in a dentist's waiting room and listen to that _sound _through the walls and make himself walk towards it. More likely he'd be groping and stumbling his way past the door jamb to heave his stomach into the gutter.

If he had to couch it in terms of what he wanted instead of what he didn't, he wanted to win. Every single round, not just the long game.

Maybe that's what El wanted too. He'd fucked up and Carolina and the kid had died - maybe El needed to win.

It could explain why he'd stayed with Sands. The brat hadn't swallowed that El being miserably lonely was enough to swing it, and well, he was probably a better judge of the impact of that kind of emotional wallowing than Sands. It would cover a whole chunk of it - an appreciation of how their areas of skill intersected and complemented, El's smooth, purely instinctual method of assessing, of fighting, and his own slower, cooler, more logical application of triggers and consequences.

Sands drew smoke into his body, deep and drowsy, let it trickle cooling between his lips while he waited for his answer.

El flicked the turn signal, a soft clicking behind the engine's purr through the change of lane. "I don't want anything." There was no maudlin self-pity in it, just a statement flat and bare.

_'I don't want any__thing I don't already have.'_

That was the same crock of camel shit El had dined out on while he'd been hiding away in guilt-fuelled hermit mode, and it was even less helpful to Sands now. It was kind of tricky to offer a man what he wanted when the guy himself didn't seem to have the first fucking clue.

On the other hand, if El couldn't manage to rustle himself up a goal worth pursuing, well, he wasn't going to go wandering off to chase it, was he?

It was still there in Sands' head, the sentence he'd laid down earlier, confident and natural. _It hasn't made a difference by now, and it isn't going to._

He hadn't just been feeding out a line to the kid, he'd believed it.

Sands had a number of different reasons why he trusted El not to kill him, why he trusted the man to watch his back and stop him screwing up if he ever looked like he was losing it. Solid reasons based on fact, on logical assessment and precedent. It pissed him off that he didn't have any concrete reasons to trust El not to ditch him, but it didn't change the fact that he did.

Maybe assuming wasn't so bad a thing, not so long as he was right.

Sands rolled his cigarette between thumb and forefinger, and tossed it out through the strip of window half-smoked. The whistle of air droned past his ear, monotonous, unchanging.

El was almost still beside him, as still as he ever was, pushing into Sands' awareness as breath and presence and the soft skim of hands over the wheel.

Sands stretched his feet further into the footwell, wriggled his ass down into the seat. Resisted the urge to turn and study with more than peripheral senses, to watch with eyes he didn't have.

Even if he was right, assuming it just wasn't very satisfying.

He found himself wondering absently what the brat's take on El's attachment to Sands would have been. Though the kid's verdicts had already shown themselves to be laughably unsound, and El's own angle on it would be much more interesting to tease out. It was one way to enliven a dull drive.

The subtle plays didn't work too well with El, and most of the time it wasn't because he didn't see them, he just chose to ignore them. The easiest way for Sands to get his answers was to trap him with bluntness - that way, if El wanted to be evasive he still would, but at least he had to be obvious about it.

Sands turned now to face El, twisting in his seat to hold himself there without cramping up his neck, still and silent and entirely focussed.

He weighed the pause, shaped the words out careful with suitable dramatic weight. "You know, the kid thinks I actually love you." He let his fingers roll slow over the denim stretched tight across his thigh. "I've been wondering if he might be right."

El flicked his head briefly Sands' way. "Good." His amusement burned through the word.

"Good?" Sands would have expected pretty much any reaction but that one. It really didn't seem to follow on too well from what should have been a heart-felt, life-in-hands kind of statement. "That's it?"

El shrugged, the standard quick rustle. "If you need to think about it, that's close enough. It doesn't matter so much if you decide in the end you do or you don't."

Sands stilled his fingers in his lap, stretched his lips into a taut line of smile. "For a guy who thinks it's such a good thing, it's noticeable how you're in no hurry to reciprocate."

"It's not what I felt for Carolina, but that doesn't matter either." El's words were quieter this time, no trace of his humour left, but they still flowed simple, instant, with no space for thought.

Sands tipped his head, curious, and decided to keep right on pressing. It wouldn't be any fun at all to stop now. "What if I think it does?"

El's head jerked back his way, fast. "Do you want me to cuddle with you on the sofa, call you 'darling'? You told me once that you weren't my wife, and that still seems to be true."

The brush of anger and bitterness through it was interesting – El didn't get annoyed by questions he didn't like, only those that really poked at a nerve, that he couldn't or wouldn't answer.

"El, if you didn't have that part soaked right the way through your skull, I wouldn't have stuck around too long."

"I know." This time it really did seem like the end of the conversation, but Sands could live with that. It wasn't the first thing El had refused to tell him, and that was just El.

He hadn't expected anything from the answer anyway – it would take a particularly self-deluding kind of idiot to fall for a sociopath, and for all his romantic streak, El wasn't, on the whole, an idiot. Sands could entertain himself by keeping right on guessing.

Except El's attention wasn't back on the road. His breathing was a little too deep and deliberate to be natural, and the edge of it warmed the air faint at Sands' ear, El's head still half-turned his way as he watched him.

Sands could be patient enough when he needed to, and he could out-wait El any day. He wriggled himself a little deeper into the curves of his seat, dropped his head back to lean against the rest, his own breath flowing light and even.

He was beginning to wish he'd closed his window before he started this. The December breeze sweeping past his neck was getting chilly at this speed, even if it did stop him choking on the new car plastic and polish.

El turned his head away, eyes locked straight onto the road before he spoke. "I'll do anything that's needed to keep you here. That wouldn't be any different if I was in love with you."

Sands held his posture draped back into the seat, but his fingers curled tight to bite through the denim into his thigh.

From an obsessive like El, that was pretty much the heaviest statement on the shelf, and it came without even a high school diploma in the way of qualification.

So that's what El wanted over everything - he didn't want anybody else dying at his feet. It slotted in nicely alongside the whole guilt thing he'd spouted for Little Lori that first night in Acapulco.

It also brought along a whole other set of issues.

Sands had known for more than a year now that he'd hauled himself into the top few spots on El's priority list, and it might have been nice to have it confirmed he was standing on the peak so he could relax and take in the view. But it wasn't, not with that line.

In a twisted kind of a way, El had just handed Sands responsibility for his life. It wasn't something he wanted, not beyond the standard making sure no dip-fucker got close enough to shoot either one of them anyway. Not to mention, there was something faintly unwelcome about the wording - that 'keep you here' instead of a maybe more understandable 'keep you alive'.

If Sands ever decided he was bored with El's company, he was gone, and the mariachi didn't get a fucking say.

Admittedly, it was looking unlikely he'd be making that call in any future he could see coming.

The aim of this whole play had been to make damn sure El never got any thoughts about heading off without him. Sands hadn't weighed in the possibility that there might be such a thing as it working too well. He probably should have, knowing his own talent for it, and dealing with a guy whose tendencies leaned just a teensy bit off to the obsessive side of normal.

Right now, it fitted in with Sands' own plans too well for him to get overly pissed about it. And Sands didn't have any aspirations to drop dead at anybody's feet either, so hey, that part worked for him too.

It was looking more and more like this arrangement was set till one of them finally took that inevitable bullet to the brain - or possibly both of them, since Sands wasn't entirely illusionary about his own chances of dealing with someone who could get through El. Clearing out of Mexico didn't change the ending, only delayed it.

But for now, the delay seemed to be working out nicely.

The car hummed low, wind around his ears and pavement under the wheels washing over the steady note of the engine. Sands reached forward to the centre console, finding and fiddling with the radio controls, skimming through stations till he found one that played something more like classic rock than classic Mexican. He settled back into his seat, fingers tapping soft and lazy over his thigh. The traffic was getting heavier this close to the airport, and he left the window open as the car slowed.

El's fingers were moving too, rhythmic on the plastic of the steering wheel, a low hum on his breath following the music, then taking it and twisting around it, adding layers under the melody. When Sands was working on a problem, that kind of shit pissed him off, but right now he was happy to lose his head in the swarm of sounds around him, let the time pass in a semi-doze, drifting him closer to a friendly jet and the airspace of some country that wasn't goddamn Mexico.

The car braked, almost hard, the traffic locking up around them, and the background staccato of El's fingers stopped with it. "So what time is our flight?"

Sands stirred himself in his seat, stretching deliberately and flexing his ankles. "Well, that depends. We're not going back to Bolivia. Not yet."

"Why not?" No suspicion, no protest from El, not ever, just simple curiosity. Sands could work with that.

"I feel like I could use a vacation." Sands needed El fast, flawless and unshakeable before they went near La Paz. It was a notable disadvantage to the bodyguard angle that people wouldn't always appreciate _quite_ how much damaging El would piss Sands off. Any hint of a weakness might just encourage somebody with ambitions to have a go at taking him out - sometimes image really was everything. "Any thoughts on where you want to go?"

Sands had the right hair and should be carrying a good perma-tan by now - when they changed papers again, he might claim himself a Hispanic parent and make them cousins.

Rising notes of engines from ahead and around, and the car moved off again, slow, the hold-up brief. "I haven't seen the sea in a long time," El said softly. "Not as it should be, to stand and watch the waves."

Not since before Culiacán two years ago, for both of them. Their last coastal visits hadn't exactly been about relaxation.

Sands wasn't going to be seeing the sea either way, but he'd always liked the ocean - maybe now would be a good time to take that delayed trip to Brazil, but El didn't speak Portuguese. Belize had good beaches and a good rep, but was just a bit too friendly with the UK, and by connection the US.

"Perfect. I believe Cuba's got a nice climate this time of year." Neither of them would be stripping down much on a public beach, too many nice round bullet scars advertising exactly what they were, but he liked the scents and touch of it, foam breaking warm across his ankles, salt and seaweed heavy in the breeze over skin and sweat. A few more weeks would get El back close enough to full action, before Sands had time to tire of the inactivity.

"Can you go to Cuba?" El asked, curious.

"I can go anywhere I like," Sands answered with a smile. "It just means a little more paperwork, that's all."

"Cuba sounds good," El said. "Do we have a flight to make?"

They would have missed the day's direct flights, but Sands preferred to route his departures from Mexico through a third country anyway. And contrary to El's perceptions, he didn't carry the entire schedule for every airline in his head, just a few pertinent destinations. "Not particularly. We could go through a few different cities, stay overnight." He'd get more details on those at the airport. Anyplace that wasn't in Mexico.

The air bled past his nose, heavy with scents of gasoline and pollution and _world_, the car swaying and dipping beneath him, the soft sounds and movements of El a constant slide into his head. It felt like three fucking decades since it had been like this, without the Ghosts of Sidekicks Present perched in the background, waiting to intrude on a good day.

This little trip was getting pretty close to just how Sands would want it. Apart from the bit where El was scarred and stiff and healing, of course, that didn't have much of a place in Sands' plans.

Sands wasn't one of those guys whose entire pathetic existence seemed to focus on their next chance at getting laid, but he did enjoy it from time to time.

Sex for Sands hadn't often been about the sex, not since he was in high school and barely even then. It had been about access, about control, about watching and pushing and finding the easiest way to take what he wanted. And hey, that was fun in a special way all its own.

But sometimes, when the exhaustion pricked at the edges, when the rats scampered and sniffed in endlessly pattering feet through his head, sometimes it was good to drown out the press of thought in the sheer physicality of the act, and the body alongside him, and that particular take on sex was now an El exclusive.

They'd traded blow jobs a couple of times the last week, nothing energetic to strain the still-healing muscle beneath the sealed, raised scar under El's ribs. Sands wasn't generally inclined to object to getting his cock sucked, but variety was a useful herb for the soup, and something a little more flexible in all senses of the word was starting to appeal.

He still had images of Foreman flicking through his head, the round neck of a baby doll Tee curving past her collarbones and clinging over the rack up front. Alice and Sophie too, a dozen others, some names he couldn't remember, just the weight and swelling shape of a tit beneath his grip, beneath his lips. Christ, even that evil witchbitch of Barillo's was there in his head, because she'd been a seriously hot piece of cunt as well as a twisted, double-crossing sadist - and he wanted it, wanted them, because fucking El was good, but it wasn't the same sensations, and the little differences really added life's cardamoms to the curry. Not that it was ever going to happen when he was just too fucking strung-out wary to appreciate a good screw even if he didn't get a needle in the neck and –

And he wondered if El would do it.

Given their current living arrangements, it might be something of a stretch to say El was straight, but he would have lived any near-normal life without ever thinking about dicks that weren't his own. It had taken a particularly twisted combination of grief, guilt and isolation to drive him to a man, though prison would probably have worked well enough too.

El had to want it, just the same way Sands did, and he didn't have much left in the way of Catholic hang-ups, if they'd ever really gotten a hold. Hell, he'd fucked his wife the day he met her - marrying her had been the afterthought some lengthy time later.

El's instincts as a double-check on Sands' judgement, the back-up against the knife blade, the counterweight to the it's-not-paranoia-when-they-really-are-out-there – it would work that way. El seemed to make the better choices overall when it came to sweet pieces of ass, though Sands didn't need a woman who'd get herself shot full of holes for him, just one who wouldn't sit back and laugh while some fucker _drilled his eyes out._

He could make it work. He could make anything work. Especially when El already wanted to be persuaded.

Sands rearranged himself angled on the seat, elbow on the door and head tipped against the rest, casually braced for the car's twitch, the slight jerk on the wheel. Waited for the lack of movement, the stillness after motion to grab at El's awareness. Waited for the curiosity, the shift of El's head his way before he let the smile creep out slow.

"So tell me, El, have you ever gotten yourself in on a three-way?"

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And that's it. THE END. I am done!


End file.
